The Helix Of My Life

     How would I have rather lived and what created, if we are to begin at the beginning? Would I have done everything otherwise? Or would I not care to change a thing?
     I know my own biography worse than I know the life and times of Pushkin – something I have spent thousands of pages describing – worse than the biographies of many Russian, English, German, French, and American writers who have been a part of the half-century of my work in literature. Besides, to talk about oneself seriously is not a serious thing, while to write unseriously about the works to which I have devoted my life would be ridiculous. It's tempting to compose an alternative biography – "What I would be like, if I had …" But I shall inscribe my own, with all its absurdities.
     In the helix of my life it is possible to make out four strands that were snapped off halfway: two of them are the Russian half; the two others, the American, or, in a broader sense, the entire world.

Strand Number One,
or My Happy Youth, Warmed by the Beams of Stalin's Constitution

     I was born in the 33rd year of what is already the last century in Zamoskvorechye, an old district of Moscow redolent of history. One should think that many of the details of infancy and youth, for those of us who aren’t Leo Tolstoy, could be omitted for brevity's sake: such details have practically no literary significance. Anyway, with my generation, our Soviet childhoods proceeded identically, in the main.
      I cannot understand how, in an eight-square-meter room, a corner of which has to hold a stove, too, our family along with our indispensable servant girl Manya fit in: she had to spread her bedding on the floor between the two children's beds and the parental sofa. Manya took me for a walk to Red Square, whispered: "Over here is where Granpa Lenin lies." I recall my fright when a cop told her sternly: "It's forbidden to point your finger at the mausoleum!" Yet another detail: I can't keep a single new telephone number in mind these days, but I can remember the phone number of that Moscow communal apartment: V1-93-46.
     I was taught to play the violin from the age of four. They took me to Zubovskaya Square, to an apartment with antique furniture and a multitude of carpets. The second violin at the Bolshoi Theater, the mother of the future director Kirill Kondrashin, "trained my hands." What a brilliant future lay in wait for me, and how I hated the violin! The Second World War solved that problem, in passing.
     When we were evacuated to Udmurtia (to Votkinsk, then Izhevsk) I learned to dig potatoes, to ride a horse and herd other horses to water, and to beat the tambourine in an institution entitled "House of Children's Artistic Education." I had Mark Twain with me the whole war, in the guise of Tom Sawyer, and two military publications that had made it as far as the provinces: The Junior Scout's Book and How to Speedily Learn to Drive a Truck. I would go scouting in the woods for cranberries, and would find my bearings, in the absence of a compass, by the moss on the trees. I made up an automobile for myself out of a broken chair with a baby-carriage wheel affixed to it.
     My clearest recollection of all is hunger, the dream of a loaf of black bread that I would be given to eat up on my own. Various bits of detail from this period found their way into my novel Passport to Yesterday, about a violinist from San Francisco, but to consider that novel — written about the fate of three whole generations — autobiographical would be to oversimplify a writer's view of his surrounding reality and fantasy as a literary device.
     From the age of ten I filled up one student copybook after another with verses in imitation of Lermontov. To this day I cannot fathom why him, in particular. It wasn't without its uses, though, because when I got a bit older I would take these compositions hiking along with me: they made great kindling for soggy wood.
     Our building had been bombed flat. After paying a bribe, we were registered in a flat that didn't exist. We lived for the next fifteen years renting a corner in someone else's place. I wore patched-up used clothes and a turned-inside-out old-lady's overcoat that caused me huge embarrassment—but there wasn't anything else. Nevertheless, I did acquire personal property: a pre-war German Messerschmidt typewriter, with Russian letters soldered onto it. I saved up my money for a year and bought it, broken, in a second-hand store, repaired it myself, and never parted with it for half my lifetime.
     For some reason I loved learning and pursued it with zeal. I memorized Gogol's prose in whole chapters. I knew half of Eugene Onegin by heart, and easily made my way through mathematics and physics. I learned English courtesy of the BBC, through the jamming — a classmate of mine built a shortwave receiver, and we would listen to it for hours. It was after high school that I discovered that the craftsman had been jailed for espionage: his neighbor asked him to make him a little radio receiver so he could tune in to foreign broadcasts, and he turned out to be an informer. Around the age of fifteen I decided to read all the classics of literature, especially Western ones. I read avidly, and not individual pieces, either, but whole collected works.
     I never dreamed of journeying to faraway places, but Jack London always lay beneath my pillow. Could it ever have entered my mind that forty years later I should have spent a considerable part of my life in northern California, not far from his house and his grave in Glen Ellen? My memory has preserved since childhood the Jack London assertion: "I'd rather be ashes than dust. Better my spark should burn out than they smother it in grayness. Better to be a meteor flashing than an eternally sleeping planet. The destiny of a man is to live, not just exist. I won't stand for wasting my days only in order to extend them. I'll seize whatever moment is allotted to me."
     Finishing high-school in 1951, I nearly won a silver medal. But I got a "three" (something like a C in America) in history "for errors in the account of the role of Comrade Stalin in the Civil War." I was turned down for a place in two Moscow universities, even though I had achieved perfect grades on their entrance examinations. At a third, the sympathetic admissions-committee chairman called down the corridor after me "And they're not going to take you anywhere – don't get your hopes up." I heard from a friend in Riga that there was a shortfall in applications to the university's Russian department. I made the trip and was accepted.
      Pushkin's formula, "A Willful Exile," could not be bettered: this was something reminiscent of his "sweet banishment." Like him, I had two different periods of banishment, and both were productive. In Riga, occupied by the Russians at the time but still redolent of the West, I conversed with Latvian people in their own language. Evenings I would make a bit of money as a third-rank actor (more simply put, an extra) in the theater—I have a non-fiction short story about that time. I collected a multitude of rare books. I played volleyball on the Latvian state students' team and made it to the All-Union championships Moscow. I wrote my first work of literary criticism, "Pushkin and Mayakovsky: Historical parallels." But I remember better how thirteen of us students lived in the cellar of our hostel. One of my roommates would come back at four o'clock in the morning from a tryst with his girlfriend, climb through the window above my head, and walk fully-shod on top of me to his own bed.
     Strangely enough, I was helped to return to Moscow and enter the historical-philological faculty of the Pedagogical Institute by the Stalinist stooge Dmitry Polikarpov, the former Secretary of the Writers' Union and the former head of the Cultural Department of the Central Committee. After the Leader's death, Polikarpov had been removed from those posts, but, inasmuch as he was nomenklatura, had been given the job of director of the Institute, the former Second Moscow University. I came in off the street to see him in the cold summer of 1953. I sat in line in the reception room and wrote out my application: I said I'd been in Riga for two whole years now, and me a Muscovite.
     Polikarpov, a beefy, simple muzhik with a booming voice, glanced at my application. "Don't need a hostel? It's more fun to guzzle down your cabbage soup at home with your family…"
     I couldn't believe my ears, that I was coming back to Moscow. The donkey's tail of disloyalty that had been pinned on me at school had withered and dropped off, evidently, in connection with the changing times in the country. But then Polikarpov shook a finger at me: "But after the Institute we're going to assign you somewhere far away…"
     He scratched the back of his head and scrawled slantwise across the application: "Enroll in third year."
     The company turned out to be a fruitful one: Vizbor, Kim, Koval, Ryashentsev, Yakusheva, and many other talented people—songs, poems, theatrical performances higgledy-piggledy with volleyball matches and hiking breaks. On one occasion, Polikarpov himself very nearly kicked us all out onto the street. He'd snuck up on one of our performances, and something about it seemed to him ideologically unrestrained.
     I earned my daily bread at the October Revolution Archive. I tramped up and down the rickety stairs in that frozen church on Kadashy, locating and bringing out the heavy paper-cases to my senior co-workers. A long line of political prisoners just out of the camps stood on the church-porch, to get their work-probation certified. I took up with some of them, then became friends, helping them write their memoirs, which then went on to be samizdat, the hand-copied and clandestinely-disseminated literature of the era. Since that time, to the present day, I have felt guilty about those people: they went to prison, and I didn't—they served their sentences for all of us, for our common sins.
     Under the patronage of the imposing Pushkin scholar Arusyak Gukasova I wrote my naïve bachelor's thesis, "Pushkin's Cycle of Lyceum Anniversaries" (the manuscript of which most likely wound up in the trash basket, like all student compositions). Of course, I neither knew nor understood Pushkin. Or, more exactly, understood him as I had been taught and as it had been possible to read about him in the filtered-down literature. But what amazed me at the time – and what I was soon to be hammered for in the seminar—was the gradual darkening mood of the poet's verse, year by year. And they did have their reasons: it was Pushkin's optimism that we were supposed to advance and strengthen, not reduce down to nothing. A line of his – "October had already come…" – was treated back then as foreseeing the Revolution.
     It would have been easy to get swallowed up by Pushkin scholars, but I had to remain myself. It took decades before I could speak out on my own. My books about him had already been published in the West.
     My work-assignment after the Institute was in essence my second exile, and a more sullen one. Even here in California now, I can't forget the real meaning of the phrase "a long way from Moscow." I spent two years in the Kazakh desert (1955—57), in the Middle Ages — with a railroad, though. This was at Saksaulsky station, not far from the Aral Sea: twenty two-story homes, a hamlet of mud-brick huts and a Muslim cemetery. The raucous, be-robed crowd at the station haggled over melons and rancid camel flesh. All the local bosses (chiefs of the station, of the police, of the central mess-hall) had three wives apiece — I don't really know who set norms like that, since four are allowed under Muslim law.
     People of various ages from the railroad depot studied at the Young Workers' Nightschool, from switchmen to train-drivers. Due to the lack of teachers, I taught all subjects except chemistry, and then I became the zavuch – a Russian position something like a principal, but only in charge of what is taught and how – as well. For a certain while the local KGB man snuffled around me suspiciously, retelling me in his accent the jokes that I had told somewhere else the day before. Ultimately a noisy meeting was held and I was expelled from the Komsomol. The true reason was that they wanted to name their own zavuch in place of the exile in their midst and, I suspected, market the high-school diplomas for profit. I did like teaching, though, and since that time I have felt comfortable speaking in front of any audience.
      I have preserved one beautifully bound exemplar of a samizdat collection of my poems, Eleven Steps (Moscow, 1969) – translations from Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, and the Latvian poet Janis Rainis – that I had done in the long evenings looking out under the howling wind onto the dead, thorny, steppe. Other poems in that collection were about events in that Kazakh life of mine, about the windstorms, when sand would crunch and grit in your teeth even back in your room, about the island of lepers in the Aral Sea, and about a plague epidemic. Afterwards only a single poem of this lot was ever published, and that only by chance. I have never had any desire to take anything from that lot for my collected works, for instance.
     Life was a whirl, in Moscow at the end of the 1950s. Nabokov said that he was born in a library. I can say that I lived in libraries in those years. Without a place of my own, without a steady job, I spent three-quarters of my time in reading rooms. And I kept moving from one friend's to another's, adding to my stock of samizdat. By the way, I am no sort of "child of the 20th Congress," as I have read somewhere. For starters, I wasn't in Moscow then – I had only camels to discuss politics with at the time. And anyway that congress was the idiot child of changes in a sick society that had long since come to fruition.
     The only thing that doesn't lose its worth over the years (apart from the pages that I have read), that remains in my memory, are conversations, the silhouettes of women, the color of clouds, and the smell of mildewed archives – that's my experience. By the time I was 25, I had tried at least a dozen professions: theatrical actor, archivist, teacher. After that, for six years I beavered away (never for long anywhere) at proofreading, book editing – I wrote my dissertation on the history of pedagogy, did my time roaming over nearly the entire map of the USSR as a roving correspondent and photographer for various publications, from Izvestiya and Sovetskaya Rossiya to little magazines like Rabotnitsa and Semya i shkola. In nasty hotel rooms with noise of drinking bouts from the other side of the wall, I would write and re-write my stories. Nothing got published.

Strand Number Two,
or Entry into Heresy

     There is a long tradition that writers burn up their calories in the engine-room of journalism. Twain, Kipling, Chesterton, Bulgakov, and a host of others all entered (or escaped into?) literature, after having wasted no little effort on one-day articles, sometimes about any sort of drivel – but having acquiring the skill to take life by the horns, and sharpening their pens in a practical, professional way. Whichever way you twist it, journalism teaches you how to write tersely, and, most important, how to ruthlessly slash not just other people's text but your own, too. The adage "Write so that your words are crowded but your thoughts spacious" is a beautiful one, but in the journalistic trade there can't be any space for thoughts. A newspaperman perpetually stamps on the throat of his own song. After all, a newspaper creates one-day trash, which it tries by any means possible to beat into the head of the readership. "I have the feeling," noted Somerset Maugham, "that all newspapers are written by just one man." This was said about England – what is there to say about my own country?
     There's yet another quality that newspapers produce in those who bring them out: skepticism – or, if you like, cynicism. There's valuable hard-won capital for you! My years in journalism, and in particular on the editorial staff of Moskovsky komsomolets (1963—71) have not been wasted. And anyway, those are the schools of life experience and technical mastery, while writerhood is something else again, somehow directly opposed to it: there the dance is with facts, here, with the imagination.
     I was 35 years old when, dealt an improbable card by Fate in August of 1968, your obedient servant – who'd never once found himself in the West any further than Uzhgorod – was allowed out of the country for a single time, and – would you believe it? – this coincided with the dispatch of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. I saw with my own eyes how tanks suppressed the Prague Spring. My internal life had come into such conflict with the external that I wouldn't have returned, if not for my family.
     After my return I could no longer keep on doing what I had been doing: I looked at myself from the side, with the eyes of the writers with whom I'd dealt in Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The birth of my big novel, Angels on the Head of a Pin, came hot on the heels of all this: a book about the journalistic cockpit, about Brezhnev's and Andropov's fear of a Moscow Spring, which they decided to suppress, about samizdat, about how the KGB, amalgamating with the Party, was striving towards power. The French diplomat Marquise de Custine anachronistically appears in stifling Moscow. This prophet of Russia's fate is armed with a sharp mind and a sharp sword.
     A part of the manuscript of Angels on the Head of a Pin was seized during a search of a friend's place. My short stories turned up in the hands of the Chekists following another search. But so far the system was merely baring its fangs without biting.
     Life was tolerable, if you paid no heed to the essence of objective reality. And if you did ponder it – better not be a writer. But it was already too late – I had become one, already begun my career as a Soviet litterateur, a career full of disappointment. It was a vicious circle: you can't, it won't do, it isn't suitable, they won't let you. I'm still astonished today at how my first book of short stories managed to get published (by Molodaya Gvardiya, in 1971) – the more so with a title like No Luck at All. By this age, Pushkin had already written everything and ended his earthly existence. As it happened, my book came out, all right – but it didn't end with a period, like any other book in the world, but with a comma: at the last moment of the last story, the censor had rejected the cloud that was creeping across the sun.
     I will say what Chekhov said: I never had a normal human childhood like that. And I constructed it in my adulthood in these short stories and the satirical novel Human-style Vacation, which was published in 1974, with the entire press run ultimately going under the knife. Now critics sometimes write that I began as a writer of children's books. So Twain, Karadzic, Dickens, Gorky, and Fielding were counted as children's authors as well? After all, they and many others have turned to their childhood often enough. Childhood is a theme as interesting to a prose writer as any other, and that's the long and the short of it.
     If we're talking about my literary influences, they weren't Turgenev, or Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky, or any of the authors of the Russian Silver Age – but Chesterton, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Marilee, Jules Reynard. Only recently I've understood what a strong impression Hoffmann made on me. Not just on me, either: both Belly and Bulgakov were under his spell. My favorite sages are Schopenhauer and La Rochefoucauld. Of my elder contemporaries, not Nabokov the prose stylist, but Nabokov the literary critic; Steinbeck and Maurois as fiction writers. Truth to tell, in the book list of the London publisher who brought out my Angels on the Head of a Pin in English, I'm in a company that's a bit odd: among the novels of Agatha Christie, Kafka, and the memoirs of Salvador Dali. Soviet authors, with few exceptions, taught me how not to write, which was, of course, a useful schooling.
     It turned out to be more important that I was ejected from the Writers' Union in 1977 than it was to have been accepted in 1971. I didn't manage to be intoxicated by what Yevgeny Shwarts called "the poisonous air of the Writers' Union." When at first I was accepted I did fall into dubious company. But once expelled I was thus included on the select list of the estranged: Pasternak, Sinyavsky, Solzhenitsyn, Lidiya Chukovskaya, Kopelev.
     In this manner I became a miscarriage of Soviet literature. From the very first I sat down to write, kept my head down, and was certain that I would never be published in my lifetime. When the time came for the KGB to inform me in the course of my latest interrogation that I was now a "former writer," already on the blacklist, I had already finished and managed to send to America my novel Angels on the Head of a Pin. Throughout this time I and my friends engaged in the dissemination of samizdat and tamizdat (publications from abroad); for a while we maintained a library in Moscow of manuscripts and of photocopies that I had made. I remember how Bulat Okhudzhava asked us not to give him any more underground books and complained that after reading things like that he was unable to write something of his own (in fact, he finishing up a book for Politizdat, a Central Committee publisher).
     So I kept on photocopying and sending authors' manuscripts abroad: they had to be saved from evil hands. Loyal authors composed works for Soviet publishers – I wrote for the garage. I had a hole there in my place that held a metal canister in which I preserved my manuscripts. I would lend them to friends to read, and that's how they entered samizdat. My microfilms were passed to the West by hand as the opportunity arose. I still have now rough drafts, ideas, and recollections, all in manuscript form, unpublished, that I use bit by bit, hopefully a basis for further writing. Certain bits wind up as constituent parts in new projects.
      I never managed to become a conventional Soviet author, even though I didn't figure at first as any sort of active opponent of the authorities. At the time, the Writers' Union was just a huge literary abortion clinic. It was a corrupt organization where they didn't so much support the ideology as advance their own people with the help of ideology. Now Communist Party Secretaries and their hangers-on who are still alive are doomed to oblivion, but back then they held the purse strings – they decided whom, besides themselves, to publish, and whom to stigmatize. They stopped the mouths of many talented authors, of course, in close cooperation with the KGB, not letting their books see the light of day. The hounded Bulgakov, who never got to polish the most important novel of his life, is far from the only example.
     All patience has an end. I'll give you the words of a Russian dissident of the first third of the 19th century, a philosopher, philologist, and poet, Moscow University Professor Vladimir Pechorin, who made it out to the West. He wrote in a letter home to Russia that he'd decided never to return, and even sent back the money that he'd received as a stipend for the trip. In his memoirs, A Justification of My Life, Pechorin explains his decision with simplicity: "I cannot be a professor in Russia because it isn't science that is required there at all, but words, declamations, obfuscations, and servile distinction."
     In 1977, after my latest interrogation in the Lubyanka and the threats to put me in a loony bin or a prison camp, I had only one desire left – to leave. Around this time they stopped the run of my comedy Teacher's in Love and prohibited my play Father for an Hour from being mounted. For a while yet my short stories continued to be published in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine, and they even published translations of a couple of books of mine. Then the veto was exercised there, too. But, in the West, they were publishing my essays I Was Born in a Line, Cancellation of Writer No.8552, and The Potemkin Olympics; my short stories were published several times over and read out over the radio.
     I was living and writing in the 70s and 80s in Moscow, but being published in the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and in the Swedish Expressen; in Russian in Dovlatov's Novy Americanets, the New York magazine Vremya i my and the magazine Dvadtsat' dva, while I frequently didn't even know where else, since what I had sent out to the West had trickled everywhere in the world. This whole time I was secretly traveling to Siberia, to the Urals, to the Crimea, gathering material for my independently-researched Informer 001, or The Myth of Pavlik Morozov. That work took three and a half years. In 1983 the book came out in samizdat, and then it was published in London. With the aim of searching out hidden truth, three years later still I finished my documentary novel A Willful Exile (the first chronicle of Prisoner of Russia) – about a new appreciation of Pushkin.
     The regime took its revenge without any hurry. The cat played with its mouse. The game went on for ten years. In spirit, I had already departed, but physically, I was a slave of the system, living without any rights, without any means of subsistence, an outcast. Ten years, neither here nor there. Ten years of suspended animation. Striving towards independence, attempts to tear loose from the net, out from under the bell-jar, out of the cage. Spiritual liberation in the face of the still-greater captivity because of oppression from our overseers.
     Of course, at the time it was impossible to imagine what step came next, but in those ten years suspended between heaven and earth, a few things did come out right. In Moscow there was the DK (for Druzhnikov/Kramarov) Underground Theater, for which I wrote the play "Who's Last in Line? I'm After You," in which we acted together with Savely Kramarov, movie star who became a refusenik of Soviet film. My express desire of the time (from the text of the comedy) went, "Please transfer me from internal to external emigration." We had a literary workshop for underground writers. I made attempts to create an independent Writers' Union for them, and a private publishing house, The Golden Cockerel. There was the publication of our open letters in the West. Ultimately there was the scandal of the public exhibition of Ten Years of Removal of a Writer from Soviet Literature and the noisy press conference for foreign journalists. Of course, these were all just mosquito bites on the hippopotamus's thick hide, but, in common with all dissidence, it was important, since silence equates to death.
     It was in this precise context that a poem of mine, "The Bed Named 'Desire' (A Paradigm to Tennessee Williams)" was born, as a kind of commentary on Nabokov's lines, "Some nights, as soon as I lie down / My bed floats off to Russia". My poem ends thus:

                                                            As soon as I lie down I see a wonder:
                                                            A bed goes floating out of Russia…
                                                            But the doorbell rings, and filth has come.
                                                            Again they take me to Lubyanka.

     The Soviet authorities behaved exactly like Chechen terrorists: they bargained with the U.S. Congress for my ransom. In September of 1987, eighty-three American congressmen signed a letter to Gorbachev with a request to let this writer go. One of them, Jerry Sikorski, flew in to Moscow and met with the Soviet president. The next morning the head of the Visa Department telephoned me at home and offered me a visa. My wife and son and I departed, surrounded by a ring of flatfeet.
     What I have read in the literary press about me being a Sixties writer is nonsense. I might have grown up around Sixties types, but that appellation will never do. I was just starting out at that time. At the end of the 1960s my first micronovels had been written, and my novel Angels on the Head of a Pin had only gotten started. I published relatively little in the 1970s. Books were published in London and New York in the 80s, and many of my things were published in Russia only after the fall of the system, beginning in 1991. Which decade should I be enrolled in, then?

Strand Number Three,
or A Texas Winter's Rainbow

     So, the helix of my life was hacked in two in 1987. Essentially, a second birth lay in store for me in the West. This is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't emigrated: émigrés apprehend the complexity of dislocation and adaptation to a new environment without any comment. Our automobile drove onto the autobahn, gathered speed, and we were live on the air. Radio and television interviews in Vienna, articles for the newspapers, proofreading the book for London, pondering where to go to live, in Germany or in America.
     I had invitations from three American universities, and, setting off for Rome to do the paperwork for entry visas, my wife and I chose one. Griddle-hot Texas and the university in Austin, the state capital, with well-wishing and cheerful people surrounding us, seemed like paradise — one in which you had to work long and hard, though. I gave one course of lectures in the English Literature department, another in Slavic Languages. Interviews, invitations to speak at other universities followed, and at writers' clubs, and over the radio. Skipping ahead a little, I'll tell you that in the years I've lived in the U.S.A. I have flown to speaking engagements in thirty cities from San Francisco to Boston, and in two dozen countries.
     In 1988 I shifted from the University of Texas to the University of California's Davis campus, right in ten miles from the California capital of Sacramento. Thus has it happened that Davis is my abode in the West, my workshop, if you like, my second homeland. And there will scarcely be a third.
     The first years of glasnost in Russia didn't extend as far as me. A lot of forbidden works had already been published, but friends of mine in Moscow were being called in for interrogation, to explain what their relations were with this traitor to the motherland. The first to reprint my Informer 001 were courageous publishers in Poland, Latvia, and Estonia. The semi-underground publisher Zebra in Warsaw brought out the book in Polish, and the publisher, in the absence of hard currency, offered to send me – instead of royalties – books in Russian, which had become unpopular in Poland. For half a year the packages came, packed full of classics, and materially renewed my ravaged library.
     I wound up doing a lot of work for Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and the BBC. The summer I lived in New York I read out my entire Informer 001 over the radio, chapter by chapter. There was an extraordinary fuss over it in the Soviet Union. The newspapers covered the author with muck for being the first to tell the truth about the sainted Pioneer (Soviet boy scout) Pavlik Morozov, who in reality had never been a Pioneer and who was, moreover, murdered by the Chekists. A government commission was set up in Moscow in 1989-90 to refute the book. The press wrote that I was going to be brought to court for insulting the honor of a national hero, but then the ideological colossus collapsed.
     In the glasnost period, my novel Angels on the Head of a Pin was nearly published on several occasions, but someone always put on the brakes. I was stuck on their blacklists, staying persona non grata. In July of 1991, as if having a premonition of the August putsch, I attempted to fly to Moscow. They stretched out the entry-visa process as long as they could and then turned me down. Thus I became a refusenik for the second time. Then, right after all that commotion, Angels on the Head of a Pin was brought out in Moscow in a huge edition by the Kul'tura publishing house.
     The essays that I had written while in Texas for various newspapers and magazines, as well as radio scripts for the Munich-based editorial operations of Radio Liberty, now got published. Later on, together with short stories, poems, and burlesques, they all went into the book I Was Born in a Line – a sort of collection of serious and humorous discussions of the life of an author in two countries, separated by two oceans.
     At least three years had passed in America before this Russian litterateur felt himself a full-fledged American, with freedom of opinion, the realization of plans, publishing of books – that were now beginning to be reissued gradually in the new Russia – and speaking engagements all over the world. My motto for that time was the words of Thomas Mann, who lived not far away in California during his own emigration: "Wo ich bin, ist der deutsche Geist" ("Where I am is the German spirit.") Only the word German was changed to Russian.
     In 1992, harking back to days of yore, I became an actor again: I appeared in the director Mark Levinson's film Prisoner of Time, playing the Russian émigré author Daniil. This somewhat humorous film about the sad fate of a Russian intellectual who emigrates to the USA was shown at a film festival in Moscow, was fun for my Moscow friends but didn't get any prizes.

Strand Number Four,
or Dissidence as the Essence of Literature

     After my escape from Moscow, I got back for the first time only in March of 1993. The notion of "the tragedy of a Russian author in emigration," I said in print and over the air in Russia, is something made up by jingoists. Emigration and lengthy stays abroad are utterly good for a writer, and, for me, a simple necessity, since I was guaranteed no involvement in cliques and afforded autonomy of discussion and of views in general – that is to say it has a positive effect on literature. Tyutchev, Gogol, Turgenev, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Nabokov, and many others worked fruitfully outside the motherland. The example of classic writers is instructive.
     My novels about Pushkin – all three chronicles of Prisoner of Russia, that I wrote in intervals over twenty years – were able to appear first in America. In this trilogy, for the first time in the history of Pushkin studies, the great Russian poet is adduced as an eternal refusenik his entire life, an internal émigré, as evidence of everlasting Russian literary slavery. Pushkin didn't finish what he'd set out to do, dying early (according to my version, committing suicide) precisely because he was kept on a chain his entire life, never once getting to see Europe.
     Although Prisoner of Russia has now been published in Russia, the country's orthodox critics are ready to eat its author alive, despite all the changes in the country. They charge me with denigrating the last Russian sacred object, the only one left undestroyed. This sort of genre, popular nowadays in America, is called psychobiography. In Prisoner of Russia, the historical authenticity is at an academic level, but its style is that of a documentary novel. I have studied Pushkin for half a century, and I maintain that my Pushkin is more vivid and closer to historical reality than the poet-idol created in service to the regime.
     At the same time it was logical, too, to do an attentive study of the myths that had been fabricated over a century and a half not only about the great poet, but his wife and his nurse, as well – about everyone that he loved or hated, and about other Russian writers. Out of this came two polemical books, Russian Myths (1995) and Duel with the Pushkin scholars (2002). The admonishing reviews of highly-positioned Russian Pushkin experts and certain none-too-bright critics, revealing the shakiness of their own severely ideologized works, are insignificant. What's more interesting is that they now winkle notions out from my books and advance them as their own – the indubitable progress of Russian Pushkin scholarship.
     I was lucky to have turned out an unsuccessful Soviet. It freed me from conformity, from the influence of interfering opinions, from the corporate spirit of the Moscow literary crowd. It is California that has turned out to be the place where I realize my projects, new and old.
     The new genre that I have named the "micronovel" has come to pass only with difficulty. Magazine editors in Russia have rendered this word as "short story," even though in America and latterly in Russia I have already had several books' worth of these micronovels published. Polish critics see in my works of literary criticism an artistic unity with my micronovels, considering the non-fiction to be blatant works of topicality, aphoristicity, humor, and satire as much as simple prose. It's nice, too, that I'm not alone anymore: the micronovel has appeared by other authors, now.
     For the originators of Russian literature in the 17th century, when the Polish language was practically native in Rus, the word fatsetsiya – from the Latin facetiae – was in use. Fatsetsiya meant a short, humorous story. Fatsetsiya gave rise to a Russian equivalent called the "ludicrous story." Not "funny," but "ludicrous" – that's a difference in principle! The word "story" shouldn't put anyone off, with its more modern meaning. At the time, the word "story" referred to any artistic text put down on paper. Several of my micronovels are in some ways such "ludicrous stories."
     The word fatsetsiya sounds great. But, in this day and age, even great prose is apt to be a boring read without satire, ridicule gibe, mockery, irony, or humor – whether the topic is Russian or American. The satirical style of narrative, the grotesque, the "ludicrous story," continues in my novel about America, Americans, Mexicans, and Russian émigrés, that I finished in 2002. It's entitled Madonna from Russia (Superwoman).
     Whenever theoreticians of literature discuss the problems of the contemporary novel (disregarding modish pomposities about its decline and even death), you can hear various definitions of it, including "the novel is everything." Such an approach is dubious because of its boundless vagueness. In any case, for me, the novel is not an amorphous body but more like a shapely topological figure, if I'm the one writing it.
     When working out a new idea, I create a hypertext (a system of nodes with subtexts) in the form of a kind of hyperbolic geometrical construction. Visually, this resembles a Moebius strip, a ribbon with its ends joined in a ring after a half-turn. The development of the action proceeds along the strip. It inexorably returns to its beginning, but now on the opposite surface. If a strip like that is split into two along its length, it doesn't divide into two separate strips, but just doubles in length, at the same time twisting around again, now twice over – in other words, the topic becomes still more complicated.
     Conditionally speaking, a novel of mine in the process of creation is a long movement down a hyperbolic strip as far as its juncture with the opposite surface: page after page, chapter after chapter. Say the novel in book form has 220 pages. The size of a single page is 7 inches – in other words, the length of the novel is around 130 feet, in the form of a Moebius strip. Of course, this is all just a jocular metaphor for the process of creating a novel.
      Properly speaking, the text depends on the measure of one's talent, the energy invested, and luck. The Moebius strip carries the topic, defines elements of the unexpected in the development of the characters returning in unforeseeable variations to their beginnings. At some stage the author twists the scheme inside out, but, in the end, having looped the loop, it comes back to itself. If it hasn't crashed and burned along the way. My Moebiusism, as a new approach, is the opposite of wan, diffuse, and subjectless post-modern prose. And, in this sense, autobiography is the same sort of Moebius-like twisted strip, and I, consequently, am a Moebiusist.
     I wasn't the one who said that a writer, by a certain age, has to see his ceiling and his walls. I came to my formation late, and I think that it was a good thing, since prose demands life experience even more than self-sacrifice. I have managed to store up three kinds of that sort of experience: Soviet, anti-Soviet, and American, almost harmoniously abiding together within me. But somewhere towards the middle of the 1990s my constant skepticism, on its way to becoming a cynicism that I had no way of dealing with, began to reveal itself in the New World, now brought to bear on Western things.
     This is criticism once again – amidst all the charms of freedom, in the most democratic country in the world, and maybe for that very reason. This is a search for weak spots in the system, failures in common human values, if you like, genetic nonconformism showing up now in analysis of the American continent, and of the Western world generally, global satire and grotesque, facetiae. I have noticed that my second outbreak of dissidence is taking its course, like a second pregnancy, more easily and calmly – and my previous experience is helping.
     Someone is leading me up the helix of my life, although not directly. "I am lost between generations," wrote the famous poetess. I nearly got lost as well, but then found myself. Somehow no one murdered me – there were numerous opportunities to do so. I nearly drowned as a child, but they resuscitated me. I fell under a streetcar as an adolescent, but didn't even lose my legs. I've never died in a car crash, even though there have been fateful moments, several times in various countries. A plane I was in caught fire, but it managed to land. For ten years I was at risk of the KGB jailing me or knocking me on the head with a bottle and leaving me for dead in my doorway. But I got through it and left. Who afforded me the opportunity, despite everything, to be, to realize myself: God? Fate? Chance?
     After my novel Angels on the Head of a Pin was published in English in London, I was invited to speak to some readers in our town of Davis, in California, where I live. I talked about Russia, about the events leading up to the novel, about the zigzags of my own destiny. Evidently my tale was an emotional one – even though a quarter-century had passed since the novel was written, still, what I had gone through hadn't been forgotten. At the end, as always happens in such circumstances, I was surrounded by several people who wanted to know more. Among them was a pregnant young woman who turned out to be the granddaughter of a woman who had emigrated from Russia. Her father, a Czech, had hurried back to his homeland when the Prague Spring occurred, there to be crushed by a Soviet tank. "We named our son Jaroslav in honor of his fallen grandfather," she said, and boasted of the fact that she'd read Angels on the Head of a Pin twice, once in Russian and once in English. She inquired about some details; we even discussed the quality of the translation a bit.
     A month or six weeks later a card came from that reader. She wrote that she'd given birth, and she and her husband had decided to name their second child after me. I look upon that as the very best literary prize that a writer could receive: in America right now lives a girl with my masculine first name, Yuri.
     Summing up, I should note that I was born under the sign of Aries. According to astrology, this first sign of the Zodiac fights for justice, represents the passions, and symbolizes as well the rejection of old traditions and the search for new paths. The moon in Aries stirs my creative juices, but my sun at April 17th is square my Neptune, provoking self-deception, unjustified hopes, and disappointments.
     Astrologers say that Aries people are idealists who strive to introduce reason into their everyday lives. If we go by Descartes, I have to control my own history (I'm not sure if I've succeeded in that). Aries are able to understand poetry and are inclined towards education. The asteroid Ceres in my horoscope – the largest of the minor planets – pushes me towards an independence of action, disobedience, heresy. In one astrological horoscope I read: "The moon in Aries brings a sense of humor, which could give one an orientation towards satire." I am wary of making any comment on all this information.
     I managed to get very little published in Soviet times, and everything that was published was distorted, chopped up, disfigured by editors and by censors. Therefore I cannot consider any text of mine published at the time under my name to be my own, and I am categorically against any arbitrary republication. I have spoken out a lot about the right of the author – and not of the editors or literary critics – to decide what to bring to light and what not to. Even those of my texts that appeared after the collapse of censorship have at times been arbitrarily altered.
     Publication – whether in print or in the Internet – is something temporary, the acquaintance of the reader with something written. The only absolute thing is the author's latest manuscript. I never stop working on my things, correcting errors, elaborating, improving texts from one publication to another. In reality the texts of mine that are ready for new publication are in the files of my home computers.
     An author composes real literature, receiving pleasure out of the process, and doesn't write "for" anyone else but exclusively for himself. When I expressed this thought in an interview – in post-Soviet times, already – in Literaturnaya gazeta, they rejected it. In the meantime, the idea of devoted service to the State by a writer (with an alternation of authorities between the terms "motherland" and "people") was one of the most mendacious of the notions that ruined Soviet literature. There's a conceit of Jules Renard's, in his Diary, that is dear to me: "My books are like letters to myself that I permit others to read." What does "for oneself" mean? I'll proffer another quote, this one from Thomas Mann: "It appears to us that we are expressing ourselves only, talking about ourselves only, and it turns out that, from some deep connection, from an instinctive commonality with our surroundings, we have created something suprapersonal. This suprapersonal is the very best that is contained in our work."
     I almost never talk about my ideas for new works, something that readers love to ask about. If you start talking about them, the content turns into improvisation, it flies off, further composition becomes uninteresting, as if it were already written. In his own way, the author is an actor: he just plays now a few of his characters' roles, now many of them, and a novel in this sense is a stage, a theater of a single actor, but the curtain is down and there's nobody in the audience. Then when the book is written and in print, that's theater at home with the reader, now, where the author's every performance is for one single spectator. And, just as there is magic in the theater, there's magic to reading, too.
     I compose slowly, sometimes delaying for years. A novel can begin from a smallish short story that gradually grows like a snowball: from day to day now a chapter, now a paragraph, now a phrase, now a single word, gets added on. Gradually twenty pages turn into two hundred. But there comes a moment when there's nothing more to add, or whatever gets added becomes extraneous, and I cut it out. That's the finale, and now I can get stuck in to the next project, as the Americans put it.
     "I have the feeling," a friend of mine said, "that I'm living a first draft, calculating that afterwards my real life is coming. Then I'll correct the idiocies in my rough draft and live the clean copy." An interesting approach. But I have no such hopes. I strive to do the maximum today. The sins of youth, the idiocies and thoughtlessness, I try to make up for right now, for there's no precedent that there's a spare life in store for us.

2003, Davis, California.
From Russian Emigre writers of the XXI Century: Autobiographies. Frankfurt am Main, 2004.
Translated by Thomas Moore