Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians - Softcover

Alma Guillermoprieto, a Mexican journalist, has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.
 

Tatyana Tolstaya is the author of two collections of stories and a novel, The Slynx. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New Republic, and other periodicals, as well as in the New York Review of Books, where most of the pieces in Pushkin's Children first appeared. After teaching at Princeton University and for many years at Skidmore College, she now lives in Moscow.

INTRODUCTION
If the really lucky writers are the ones who survive the hideous
misadventures of history, then Tatyana Tolstaya is fortunate beyond telling.
Consider the devastating events she and her countrymen have lived through
in the half-century her lifetime spans: hunger, persecution, treachery and
corruption, highly convoluted inducements to fear, brainwashing (and,
sometimes, in the face of it, the most heroic adherence to the liberty of the
mind), scarcity and demeaning—not ennobling—poverty, decades of spiritual
stagnation and disgust. And then consider the stage on which these
tragedies of the Soviet Union played themselves out: Great Russia itself, the
chill white motherland, endless, magnificent, all-consuming. Oh, to be born in
the proximity of such material!
Even better luck, the author who claims this rich inheritance came
of age as a writer sometime around the middle of the 1980s, just in time to
record the death by putrefaction of Soviet socialism, the collapse of its vast
empire, and the subsequent lurching advance of the post-Soviet state.
These events took place beginning in 1985, with the designation of Mikhail
Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. His momentous years in power were followed by
the adventures in government of President Boris Yeltsin. Under the pallid
leader Vladimir Putin, Russia now struggles with its past and future.
Tolstaya has written about all of it and so presents the happy reader with the
twenty essays in this book, a brilliant writer"s ongoing account of the most
transcendent political event of the second half of the twentieth century.
Tolstaya has published three other books in English translation:
two short works of fiction written in a delicate, richly meditative register, and
her latest novel, The Slynx. As a writer of fact Tolstaya takes on a very
different voice. In fact, she writes as a participant in her country"s
lamentable history, and she is a spinning fury, emitting words like sparks,
enraged, saved from choking on the absurdities she has been called to
witness only by the irresistible need to laugh at them. Indignation is her
creative fuel, and her only relief is a related mordant tenderness for the sorry
protagonists of so much stupidity. She does beautifully when she has to
wave farewell to the poet Joseph Brodsky, dead so long before his time. She
does even better, though, when she takes on the lumbering Boris Yeltsin and
slaps him around in print, calling him a great Russian dolt, upbraiding him for
doing this and failing to do the other, then stops in her tracks to observe him,
deathly tired of so much responsibility, as he asks his helicopter pilot to land
by a river and just linger a while. And what of her description of the epic,
pathetic, and maligned Russian Everyman, grimy from centuries of poverty
and self-neglect, without so much as a radish to bite on before he gulps down
a shot of vodka, sniffing instead at the filthy sleeve of his greatcoat in order to
get, at least, a good whiff of its many spicy odors?
Tolstaya is the offspring of a deeply literary family (although, she
has said, she was well into adulthood before she started writing, in
response to "steady and gentle pressure" from her father). Lev Tolstoy is
among her forebears. Her paternal grandfather, Alexei Tolstoy, was a famous
writer of the Soviet era. Her father was a brilliant scholar. Her mother"s father,
Mikhail Lozinsky, produced definitive translations of Shakespeare, Dante,
and Lope de Vega. Tolstaya was born while Joseph Stalin was still alive, but
the near-sacred family name shielded its members from terror, and Tatyana
grew up in relative comfort in a book- filled apartment—all of which placed her
rather outside the Soviet norm and granted her precocious observer status.
She learned early to tell stories and quarrel with words, and would suffer
when she was not able to find the inner words to describe her feelings, she
later recalled. At university she studied the classics. She worked in a
publishing house. At last, she started writing. She made a short trip to the
United States and then, in the company of her husband, moved there in
1989. She learned English, and when she realized she was learning too
much of it she fled back to her native country, before her Russian suffered
any damage. (She retains enough English, however, to work closely with
Jamey Gambrell on the latter"s beautiful, muscular translations.)
The author"s childhood, glowing and privileged in so many ways,
nevertheless coincided with the cold war"s years of frozen panic, and also
with the long interregnum in which the Soviet leadership relaxed in power,
believing itself eternal. Growing up surrounded by the bad faith and false
language of that particular stage of socialism, Tolstaya learned to take
rhetoric seriously. This lucky accident—yet another!—gives her enormous
range, as rhetoric permeated every aspect of Soviet life. Lenin"s tomb was a
rhetorical exercise, and so was urban design, as Tolstaya reminds us when
she writes about the heirs to Field Marshal Potemkin: the scruffy
bureaucrats who ordered all the houses on Richard Nixon"s route to the
Kremlin painted and refurbished in preparation for his visit. But most of all, of
course, rhetoric dominated language, and language dominated thought. "The
Party is our Helmsman!" "You are walking the true path, comrades!" (rhetoric
loves exclamation points) and "The Party is the Mind, Honor, and Conscience
of the People!" (rhetoric loves capital letters, too) are among the deadly
avalanche of slogans the young Tatyana"s love of words survived.
The author"s swift, skillful weaving between false words and the
reality they hit at a slant allows her readers to become intimate with the
eerie unnaturalness of Soviet existence. On the surface, the coarse fabric of
everyday life could not have been more stultifying and commonplace. But
because it was shot through with the glinting thread of so many wild,
extravagant, preposterous lies, it acquired a dreaminess, a mythical quality,
that serves Tolstaya"s literary purposes well. Memorably, she tells how, as
a child playing in the courtyard, she helped defeat U.S. imperialism and the
omnipresent network of spies and infiltrators she had been warned
against: "Who knows, they might be anywhere, disguised as Soviet citizens
in regular clothes. They would reveal all our mysteries, steal the secrets of
our might, and, God forbid, become just as strong and unconquerable as
we were." These enemy agents must be deceived at all costs. When on a
spring day an aged, wheezing couple shuffles towards her to ask directions,
she understands her duty and sends them tottering away in the opposite
direction from the botanical gardens they wish to visit.
Early guilt can carve an entire life into a different shape. Age
eight, watching the elderly couple make their painful progress in the wrong
direction, she is overwhelmed by the knowledge that they are not spies. "I
heard the scrape and clank of the cogs in the state propaganda machine, a
machine that had forgotten why it was turning," she writes. She
understands something basic about how the lies her elders told her have
twisted her soul. Who knows but that her nonfiction writing career has been
one long effort to make things right with the two pathetic strangers she
betrayed as a child?
Be that as it may, any writer"s struggle to survive a regime that
dictates thought is a remarkable moral journey. Alice, making her way
through the looking-glass world, passive and bemused and so easily
conned into apologizing for mistakes she has not made, acquires great moral
power when she at last succumbs to rage. "I can"t stand this any longer!" she
yells, sick of the insanity, sick of the Red Queen and her threats. Then she
picks up the pathetic, flailing queen and shakes her and shakes her and
shakes her . . . until at last she wakes up. So Tolstaya.
In Tolstaya"s writing, we get a first-person Alice, clear-eyed and
back from mirror land. There is a luminous directness to Tolstaya"s
discussion of Russian intellectuals, who have struggled for two centuries to
understand whether it is morally tolerable to write as Pushkin did, without
political engagement. Curiously, although Tolstaya comes down squarely
on the side of creative freedom, it is as a chronicler of political events that her
own words catch fire. Her opinions are passionate, changeable, arguable,
and sometimes even questionable—she is not, praise heaven, that most
tedious of media creatures, a pundit—and every one carries the full force of
the lived moment. She is not a reporter with a tape recorder in her hand, but
a Russian writer with a unique voice and an urge to communicate the state
of things.
Emerging from these pages, we can imagine Tolstaya and her
world with such intensity that it would be difficult to persuade us of any
difference between our imagination and her reality: the prerevolutionary
kitchens with their pheasant consommés, their ovens like furnaces, and the
miserable servant sleeping in the cupboard; Stalin and his handy eraser,
with which he cheerfully removed his enemies not only from the world of the
living but from the pages of photographed history too; Solzhenitsyn, once our
moral guide, now the dreary geezer mouthing tedious, endless nostrums in
the wasteland of the television screen. It"s all so appalling, so hopeless, so
ridiculous. If one could only stop laughing, it might be possible to give in to
a spell of moral anguish. "Oh, but you know, I heard the most amazing thing
today. Let me tell you . . ." Tolstaya exclaims, and we listen entranced to
her latest story.
—Alma Guillermoprieto

Copyright © 2003 by Tatyana Tolstaya
English translation copyright © 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995,
1996, 1997, 1998, 2000 by Jamey Gambrell
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.