Reviews by Robert Blaisdell
This volume contains the poet Konstantin Vaginov’s dizzy comic novel Goat Song (Козлиная песнь) and the less disorienting, equally comic novella The Works and Days of Whistlin (Труды и дни Свистонова). It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s Vaginov (1899-1934) was associated with the absurdist Daniel Kharms. One of Vaginov’s narrators says of the author-like character Whistlin that “all of his works emerged from messy scribblings in the margins of books, stolen metaphors, skillfully rewritten pages, overheard conversations, inverted rumors.” Vaginov was highly regarded by, among others, his friend Mikhail Bakhtin, who apparently guest-stars as “the philosopher” in Goat Song, which in this revised version was not published because of Soviet censorship in Vaginov’s lifetime. By the way, according to the translator, the author’s parents (longtime citizens of the Russian Empire) changed their name from Wagenheim to Vaginov in the early days of World War I and pronounced it “VAH-ghee-noff.”
On account of the St. Petersburg/Leningrad setting, the book blurb mentions Vaginov “echoing” Nikolai Gogol, and I was skeptical until Vaginov’s deadpan scenarios and attention to noses asserted themselves: “It was spring again. … The plumped-up trees of the Summer Garden, the young saplings on Victims of the Revolution Square, the bushes in the little Catherine Square, all served as a reminder of the season for those distracted by the hubbub of life. … some amputee, a former lieutenant, recipient of a state pension, might sit a while on a bench and recall: ‘I used to play here in the sand’ … And sigh and, lost in thought, pull out a dusty handkerchief redolent of a whole series of odors – black bread, breaded cutlet, tobacco, soup – and blow his nose in desperation. When the handkerchief is put away – all the odors disappear from the air.”
Both lively works enjoy a spontaneity of invention and are as “modern” as any twenty-first-century fiction. In the afterword, translator Ainsley Morse, who has a wonderful ear and touch, justifies her bending of the characters’ names into parallels in English, but why not simply footnote the resonant names for readers who have no Russian? Balmcalfkin (unfortunately renamed from Teptyolkin), a lonely idealist, admires his unbound friend who “might scribble down a few lines without even thinking, but it would come out clever, by damn, so clever. And there would be destruction in these words, and great passion, and a plaint for the sun setting for all time. The words themselves thought for the unknown poet.”
Indeed, Vaginov’s words swirl and settle like a flock of pigeons: “in my youth, by putting words together, I came to know the universe, and a whole world emerged for me in language and rose up from language. And it turned out that this world risen from language coincided astonishingly with actuality.”
Goat Song’s “unknown poet,” whom Vaginov parodies as a version of himself, is not distinct and real in a Tolstoyan or even Gogolian way; all the characters, despite being based on Vaginov’s friends and on himself, are cartoonish. Several of them understandably wish they were still living in pre-Soviet times; they’ve lost fortunes, housing, status. One of the narrators footnotes and critiques the very work we are reading: “Whistlin wrote in the past tense, sometimes in the past perfect, as if what he was describing had ended long ago; as if instead of thrilling reality he was taking up an event long since completed. He wrote about his era as another writer might write about distant times with which his readers were not well acquainted. He generalized the events of everyday life rather than individualizing them. Without suspecting as much, he described contemporaneity using a historical approach, one extraordinarily offensive to his contemporaries.”
Judging by this volume (NYRB will soon publish his two later novels), Vaginov, who died from tuberculosis before Stalin and his goons could do him in, is an author from the USSR’s first decade who deserves a second life. As Whistlin reflects: “literature can be compared to life after death. Literature in actual fact is life after death.”
In his 2017 movie Loveless, director Andrey Zvyagintsev takes a sharp left turn from his domestic drama to the real-life search-and-rescue group Liza Alert. That volunteer brigade of do-gooders and neighbors sets out in an intense but methodical search for the unhappy 12-year-old son of a divorcing couple who has run away. The efficiency and civic-mindedness of Liza Alert’s teamwork is as inspiring as any strategic scene in war movies. Meanwhile, the local Moscow government officials sit on their lazy hands.
Anna Arutunyan, a Russian-American journalist, born in Moscow and raised in the American South (“Trump country,” she calls it), “challenges the lazy analysis of Russia as a mystery and its people as being predisposed to their ‘learned helplessness’ before state power.” In an unargumentative plain-spoken manner, she presents the parallel lives of dissenters from Ivan the Terrible’s time to Putin the Horrible’s present day. She understands the complications the various historical figures faced and points out the inconsistencies or contradictions of their actions. She sets up “parallel lives” in the manner of the historian Plutarch, comparing and contrasting, for example, Prince Andrei Kurbsky and Alexei Navalny and, more closely, Catherine the Great’s nemesis Yemelyan Pugachev and Putin’s rogue mercenary, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin.
While reporting for The Moscow News in 2012-13, Arutunyan witnessed “tens of thousands of young people, raised on two decades of relative affluence and political stability, [who] were actively defying their autocratic government. … They were defying a depressingly Russophobic notion: that Russians were somehow prone to submission.” She reflects: “Never mind that all of Russian history is a story of dissent and rebellion.”
Arutunyan shares something of M. Gessen’s political savvy and ability to make cool analyses but is more hopeful: “despite the temptation to write off the last decade as a period of civic retreat, these clusters of local and national grass-roots initiative demonstrate exactly the opposite. They may not technically represent rebellions, dissent, or revolt, but in their own way they offer something more important, and potentially more lasting: rather than tearing down repressive edifices, they are building something alongside them, with thousands of lawyers, activists, labor organizers, community volunteers, and municipal council candidates establishing networks and practices, accumulating and honing civil skills, and fighting to build electoral procedures that may be brought to bear in subsequent years.”
As a dual-citizen, the 44-year-old Arutunyan left Russia in March of 2022 for her family’s sake. Yet her advocacy, quiet but persuasive, is for possibilities; she denies historical inevitability and believes that recent and distant past events could have gone differently; for instance: “there were any number of alternatives to Stalinism throughout the early Soviet period.” Today, through small group efforts centered on community and human rights and – in the mode of Navalny – confronting the government about following its own laws, democratic structures can form and be ready when the ineffectual and corrupt state collapses on itself.
She concludes: “It’s a dangerous, uphill battle, and it’s a great deal harder and far less glorious than penning withering indictments of Russia’s imperialist culture from the safety and luxury of Western campuses, but when the next Thaw arrives, these thousands of nameless Russians will have formed the building blocks of a new, unique Russian democracy.”
In the first two-thirds of The Last Soviet Artist, Victoria Lomasko composes and illustrates (this is a book of “graphic” – as in graphic novels – reportage) her travels in the mid-2010s to the former Soviet republics Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, Ingushetia and Dagestan. Her quiet, sympathetic, discreet depictions seem to have inspired and put at ease the people she met. Her rule, as in her previous, outstanding collection Other Russias (see the RL blog of March 6, 2017: bit.ly/RL2503A), is to draw the action and people right then and there. She doesn’t work up the drawing from photos; she and the subject intersect. She says she modeled this procedure on pre-photographic journalism; it has allowed her access to protests and political trials when cameras would be forbidden or restricted. This doesn’t make her a participant but does establish her presence and vision.
There is occasional humor in response to her in-person sketches: “Half an hour after I gave a man his free portrait he returned with the drawing. ‘I took a closer look,’ he said, ‘and realized that you made the nose too big.’ Another model, a honey merchant, was also unsatisfied. ‘Everyone tells me I have a straight, Grecian nose. But in your drawing, there’s a hump.” Lomasko called herself “the last Soviet artist” because when she attended art school in Moscow in the early 2000s, she found that her preference for drawing “realistically” was out of step with her classmates, who had taken up more fashionable (i.e., post-Soviet) modes.
Her trips south were, she writes, relievedly uneventful and peaceful, but a repeated revelation is that, despite the severe political restrictions of the Soviet Union, women’s lives were educationally and culturally more advanced; at a meeting of feminists in Osh, Krygystan, Lomasko learns that “their Soviet grandmothers … were the most progressive people in their families, advising their granddaughters to study languages and travel the world.” Her interviewees in the several regions cited horrifying recent instances of “wife”-kidnapping, ritual female-circumcision, not to mention that in a village in Dagestan, a husband and father of ten remarks: “When my wife was pregnant with our last child, the doctor said she might die—she needed to get an abortion. I told him, ‘Let her die. I’m not going to kill my own children.’” There Lomasko shows us the glib speaker, hands folded, sitting on the plush couch in his slippers beside his flamboyantly dressed, head-covered complacent wife. Sad to say, several old-timers, even those whose families were directly affected by Stalin’s paranoid, senseless atrocities, miss the long-departed monster. An elderly former KGB agent in Tbilisi has created “Stalin’s Underground Printing House Museum.” Its proprietor complains: “Sometimes, no one will come for two weeks at a time!”
What’s extraordinary after the essential collection of her The Last Soviet Artist chapters is Lomasko’s penitent renunciation of it, as if she has moved on, thought better of the project – that is, thought worse: “It was difficult editing the first part. It felt like the chapters had been composed by some stranger who’d put together the ‘right’ elements like a puzzle: activists and feminists, the history of social inequality, and examples of civic initiatives.”
After traveling to Minsk in August 2020 during Belarus’s protests against the dictator Lukashenko, Lomasko found she had lost heart for the dangers and risks of challenging authoritarians. She announces in the short concluding sections that she has turned over a new leaf and will detach herself from the frenzy of social justice and political resistance: “I’m glad to be parting ways with the tedious Last Soviet Artist for whom political developments were more important than the first flowers coming up in the courtyard.” Many writers and artists renounce their previous work (Tolstoy was an old hand at this), but never before have I encountered a work that rolls up the carpet after itself: “Why not try writing about something other than protests and the activists who participate in them? For example, art and the artists who make it.”
Unlike her first book project, Other Russias, the cartoon speaking-bubbles are rendered only in English. Fortunately Bela Shayevich’s translation is crisply colloquial and modern. One of Lomasko’s graphic-artist heroes, Joe Sacco, steps in after her exile in 2022, and for four fine pages illustrates her words with a sympathy that Lomasko scarcely grants herself.
Despite her misgivings, The Last Soviet Artist contains the most effective travel-writing I have ever read of former-Soviet communities. Her bold, thick lines and occasional watercolor washes give us a sense of presence and intimacy that photographs and descriptive writing often struggle to achieve. Lomasko’s closing the door behind her own accomplishments is, I’ll conclude, interesting and touching. As she knows, she’s done enough; though she has left the country on account of Putin’s war, she is proud of being a Russian artist: “When I hear calls to ‘cancel’ Russian culture, I think: Go ahead and kill me, too. I have no other path, no other identity besides being an artist. … I’ve spent my entire life drawing a single work of art – one that takes as its subject freedom of choice and the uniqueness of every individual.”
The hero and narrator of this continually compelling novel is Connor Chessick, a young American cameraman who in January of 1994 ventures to Tomsk to work for a new independent TV station. He has American know-how, but the Siberian city’s facilities are ramshackle. He helps out with the make-do technology while rapidly improving his idiomatic Russian. He meets interesting citizens left and right. Some are idealistic, many are good-hearted, a few are dangerous. And he becomes confusedly and deeply involved with one: Alina, a beautiful, smart advertising agent for the station.
She slipped off her boots. “You should have slippers for your guests.”
“I just washed the floors,” I said as I went into the kitchen in my sock feet. “I could give you some wool socks.”
“Did you clean because you thought I was coming over,” she asked as she followed me. “Are all American men so domestic? Do you clean with a smile, just as you do everything with a smile?”
Alina is, we find, with her moods and tempers, more Dostoevskian than Chekhovian.
Though “This is a work of fiction,” Cummings insists before we’ve read a word, and that “any names or characters, businesses, events or incidents appearing in this work are fictitious,” there is such a seeming and impressive fidelity to everyday details and to ultra-particular narrative by-roads and detours that I will take as tongue in cheek the author’s legalistic claim that “Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is coincidental.” (I have journals too of my many trips in and around Russia, and I only wish I had been as talented as Cummings to work them up into a good novel.) Cummings tells us, in the author’s blurb, that “he returned to Russia in 1994 and lived in Tomsk, where he worked at one of the country’s first independent TV stations,” which is quite a coincidence, since that is exactly what his narrator Connor does!
The most comparable book to this, minus the important love story and the historical perspectives at their finest, is Ian Frazier’s thoroughly nonfiction Travels in Siberia. In both books, we are given the grit, trials and marvels of everyday life in Siberia. While Cummings generally writes plainly and conversationally, when he does become poetical and ecstatic, it’s because the scene and its feeling are too. Out in a sleigh with a Sibirsky cowgirl, recalls Connor, the horse “pulled us through snowy fields, Olya and I bundled up together beneath sheep skins and a canvas tarp. We squinted at the blaring white landscape, at the crystal sky. ‘Go on and gallop now,’ she shouted, smiling and giving the horse a switch. We flew through the snow. Birch and cedar raced in a wooly blur at the edges of the field. Upon hitting a drift of snow we smashed through like a boat through a wave and were encircled for a flash by a phosphorescent plume of icy dust. Laughing, we squinted against the tiny stings, then brushed ourselves off.”
As narrator, Connor’s detachment is occasionally off-putting, and Cummings, to his credit, doesn’t try to justify his hero, who is not long out of college yet can already be something of a middle-aged grouch. He has his American faults and qualities, and so do the Russians. During a trip that he and Alina take to the Altai Mountains, they face, in turn, disturbing harassment as well as that marvelous Russian generosity:
“You’re from America, da? You’ve come a long way. Our little flat isn’t much, but it’s better than the front steps of the Pedagogical Institute. My wife will be asleep by now, but she won’t mind getting up and fixing you something to eat.”
“Vasily Sergeivich, eto ne nado,” protested Alina. “Please don’t wake your poor wife. We’ve had enough to eat. We just need to sleep. We’ve got to catch a bus early in the morning.”
“She wouldn’t hear of it. I’d be in trouble if I didn’t wake her up for pleasant young guests such as yourselves. What time is your bus? I’ll wake you when I get off my shift. I can take you down to the station.”
Alina smiled and nudged me victoriously. One of her beleaguered countrymen had come through for her with the famous Russian hospitality.
Soon, however, Connor, anguished by the murder of an idealistic politician who has been fighting corruption in Tomsk, and under the pressure of threatened violence against the TV station, decides to return home after only eight months and leave Alina behind.
Soroka is a realistic novel vividly presenting a particularly momentous time in post-Soviet history – and just maybe a momentous period in Cummings’ own life.
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