Margaret Meklin

Many Countries, One Language: Literature of the Russian Diaspora

It has been a deep-seated tradition in Russia to oust its intellectuals, so it is no surprise that many Russian writers now reside outside their country of birth. Another factor contributing to this phenomenon has been the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left many Russian-speaking republics on their own. - Aas a result, there are a number of writers living in these republics who have never been accounted for by Russian critics and Slavists. In this article, I would specifically like to look at the Russian literature in the U.S., France and Kazakhstan.

My brief visit to Kazakhstan took place this summer. As an independent consultant, I was assigned to evaluate Musaget, a Russian literary organization that, in a country suspicious of independent writing and thought, stays afloat through financial support from a Dutch cultural fund. Musaget's goal is to nurture, through its creative writing seminars, contests and the literary quarterly, Apollinary, emerging avant-garde writers in an otherwise malnourished literary Kazakhstan.

There is no latitude of contemporary literature in this oil-rich, luscious land, enviously eyed by the U.S., Russia, and China, since the works still in favor are those created in keeping with the canon of Socialist Realism which paints the former Soviet province in a positive and upbeat light. Writers walking on the sunny side of the page get published by state-subsidized publishing houses; writers choosing dangerous, derelict paths, who dare to depict impoverished, impossible lives, are ostracized; writers criticizing the president and his clan are driven into seclusion and silence.

It would be too easy to say that the lack of democracy in Central Asia is slowing down cultural development there. Beside external barriers, there are internal ones too, such as shame, internalized homophobia, and the inability to speak for oneself. The words "made in the USSR" are so deeply engraved within everybody born in the Soviet Union that many generations will have to come and go before this old, stale mentality is completely dissolved. Speaking to Dulat Isabekov, a heavy-lifter of Kazakh literature whose plays are routinely staged in Kazakhstan theaters (one of the reasons, perhaps, being that Isabekov, not a bad writer himself, also serves as the director of the state-sponsored Research Institute of Culture and Fine Arts), I learned that such topics as sex and homosexuality, gender inequality, drugs and domestic abuse are shunned. In addition, in an attempt to preserve the "native Kazakh culture," the Writer's Union of Kazakhstan, still not free of its nomenclature nature, pressures local literati to incorporate "Kazakh motifs" into their works. At the same time, the Union admits with great reluctance new members who write in Russian, preferring writers who write in Kazakh (aside from ethnic Kazakhs using the Kazakh language, there are a number of Kazakhs writing in Russian).

In general, it can be said that one of the factors slowing down the literary process in Kazakhstan (and perhaps in other former Republics of the USSR) is ethnic tension. During the Soviet era, Russian was viewed by many as the language of the oppressor. Once the republics dissociated themselves from the Soviet Union, they immediately began instigating ethnic, if not nationalistic, feelings, subsequently trying to get rid of Russian culture and language at once, and this attitude, as well as the atrocities directed against them, caused many Russians to leave. Still, there is a massive Russian presence in Kazakhstan, with Kazakhs approximating 45% and Russians 35% of the population. Taking into account that on the streets most people speak Russian, it is troubling to know that the Russian literature output here is puny.

Overlooked by the Writer's Unions and invigorated mostly by non-governmental organizations such as Musaget, with its nine-employee collective crammed into a three-bedroom apartment, Russian literature in the republics of the former USSR is simply ignored by Russia. The Ukrainian editor Mikhail Bubyakin, when told about my mission to Almaty, dismissively said, "Kazakhstan is just a province. Every new word in literature is now uttered in Moscow and Saint Petersburg." Dmitrii Kuz'min, a Moscow critic, once wrote in his Internet blog that, its existence assumed, Russian literature in the former Soviet Republics - where Russian is the native language for many - is of an extremely poor quality. Whereas a critic or writer from Kazakhstan will try to catch every "new word" whispered in Russia's cultural capitals, it is unlikely that a columnist from, let's say, Moscow would pay any attention to a publication from Kazakhstan or any of the other "provinces."

Even the locals, in a country starving for democratic freedoms and food, have little regard for their own authors, preferring contemporary literature imported from Russia. Shelved under the rubric "contemporary" in the Almaty bookstores are fiction and non-fiction from U-Factoria (Ekaterinburg), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (Moscow), Inapress (St. Petersburg), and Amfora (Moscow - St. Petersburg). Books in Russian produced locally by independent non-profits, such as Musaget, are rejected by salacious for-cash salesmen-booksavvies.

Russian literature, unlike in the fruitful, though frightful, "White émigré" times, does not flourish even in Europe. For instance, take France. There they have the literary quarterly Stethoscope, a thin twin of Kazakhstan's Apollinary, devoted in its entirety to new Russian writing. With many similarities between them - both magazines encourage a writer's innovation and inner freedom and display no special penchant for politics or polemics (or, as the nasty narrator from Nabokov's Look at the Harlequins would say, they express a "pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds, and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers") - Stethoscope is luckier than its Kazakhstan "counterpart," having secured some distribution in Russia, no matter how miniscule.

One of the most prominent Stethoscope's authors is Andrei Lebedev, a Parisian in the prime of his prose, who, in spite of a prolific pile of writings in Russian, failed to find a publisher and financed all his projects himself. His latest work, entitled Gorodorog, a Russian palindrome for A City of Many Paths, is an anthology which, with a circulation of thousand copies and a selling rate of two copies per month, is going to take forty years to completely sell out. Inspired by Guy Debord and "situationist" ideas about psychogeography as a science researching the influence of geographic environments on the emotions and behavior of urban inhabitants, Lebedev collected writings of contemporary Russian writers who analyzed their relationships with Lima, San Francisco, Istanbul, Krakow, and St. Petersburg.

There is one feature that Lebedev and the editors of Stethoscope and Apollinary (which claims to be the first journal in Kazakhstan to print an essay by Jacques Derrida) share: they welcome authors not only from France or Kazakhstan, but also from Germany, Russia, Romania, the U.S. and other countries. The opposite is true for many magazines published in Russia. Many editors there do not like to publish "foreigners"; also, a number of Russian literary prizes, e.g., the Yuri Kazakov award for short stories, are given only to "Russian citizens who live and work within the territory of the Russian Federation." This is in spite of a multitude of astounding authors - Polina Barskova, Mikhail Gronas, Helga Olschwang (all from the U.S.), Alexei Parschikov (Germany), Alexandra Petrova (Italy), Alexei Tzvetkov (Czech Republic) and others - who reside abroad.

All of the aforementioned people are poets; there is not much good Russian prose in the U.S., one of the reasons being the massive market here for local fiction. The allure of the literary American dream is so big that many Russian émigré writers, such as the Guggenheim fellow Mikhail Iossel or the "Russian debutante" Gary Shteyngart, both originally from Leningrad, have abandoned their Russian word wells and started drilling in English (this move could prove successful: had Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita failed to impress the American public, Russians, suckers for foreign flattery, would probably still congregate to decide whether to consider him great).

In Russia, literature is not so much about what you are paid; it is about what you pay. Many not very well-known, but nevertheless gifted Russians living abroad, who are not perceived to be "commercial" by various publishers, are paving and paying their way into the literary Olympus with dollars and shekels, showering money on magazines that will accommodate for free not very well-known authors living in Russia. I can name two reasons for this. The first is that the sluggish literary process in Russia is propelled by literary prizes given preferably to Russians living in Russia, turning magazines, therefore, into fiction factories, wholesale suppliers of short stories and novels to sponsors - bountiful bankers and jovial jurors, who, in their turn, glorify the magazine's name. The second reason is the assumption that whoever lives abroad is rich. Often Russians depreciatingly call their former compatriots ham - not head - hunters, suggesting that the industrious émigrés, who have left Russia for Israel or the U.S., are now able to afford hefty portions of ham.

Having nothing to do with this stereotype, many Russian émigrés in the U.S. eagerly participate in the group literary activities that usually take place in New York. One of the major players on the New York literary scene, Koja Press, is pouring money not into ham, but into handsomely bound editions, publishing the literary periodical Magazinnik, marred by a somewhat garish design. A recent success of this press is Edison in Paradise, a miniature poetry chapbook by the New Yorker Leonid Drozner, originally from Kharkov, a minimalist poet, prose writer and painter with an affinity for the "Lianozov Poetry School."

The second player on the New York scene is the Ugly Duckling Presse, with its economically packaged Eastern European poetry series presented in sheepish, unpretentious volumes. One of the upcoming entrees on this publishing house's menu is Arkadii Dragomoschenko, an eloquent essayist and poet of the "language school" from St. Petersburg, whose elegant novel Chinese Sun - with its love for the fluidity of time and flirting, liquor and long sentences, philosophy of language and Wittgenstein, bicycles, Borges and bytes (Dragomoschenko is one of the first Russian writers to use computer terminology in his works) - will be published by Ugly Duckling in English. An underground guru, Dragomoschenko is well-known in Russia for his pro-American views, an image only reinforced by his teaching stints at SUNY-Buffalo and the University of California (San Diego). A frequent lecturer with the Philosophy department of St. Petersburg University, Dragomoschenko has positioned himself at the vanguard of intellectual thought. Take American literati such as Paul Bowles and Eliot Weinberger, Lyn Hejinian and John Ashbery, Diane di Prima and Allen Ginsberg, or the Russian philosophers Aleksander Sekatzkii (St. Petersburg) and Mikhail Yampolsky (U.S.A) - Dragomoschenko has collaborated with all of them at one time or another, translated their writings or simply made them known in Russia through his tightly weaved, erudite essays full of literary allusions, home-made aphorisms and surprising twists usually associated with short stories or novels.

Even though there are Russian prose writers in the U.S., no charismatic figure emerged here in the nineties aside from already established émigrés of the older generation such as the late humorist Sergei Dovlatov or the deadly serious Alexander Genis with his timely essays on every possible theme. Uprooted from the country of their upbringing, writers who do not mix with the New York crowd have almost no means to reach their audience and, unless they rub e-mail shoulders with St. Petersburg and Moscow literati, as the author of this article did, their writings stay mostly unknown. The diminishing interest in Russian affairs does not help either. What the Western world saw behind the Iron Curtain was a bare-skinned and bewildered individual, who, after being considered harmless, was left alone to continue taking his blood bath. As a result, even though the fierce flame of conflicts in Chechnya or South Osetia has not being extinguished and a war is being waged against freedom of the press, Russian dissident writers (a niche occupied in the past by Aleksander Soltzenitzyn and Yuz Aleshkovsky, aided by their political status in achieving an international fame) have lost their appeal in the West.

Among the writers able to break into the publishing world are Konstantin Pleshakov and Vadim Mesiatz, whose novel Treatment by Electricity became a finalist for the Russian Booker Prize. Neither Pleshakov nor Mesiatz, however, were able to achieve popularity, unlike the aforementioned Alexander Genis, who has become a Russian Frances Mayes (with her sunny, but unsarcastic and soapy Tuscany), penning pseudo-ethnographic, yet entertaining essays on fishing in Philadelphia or gardening in Great Falls. The reason for the meager response to Pleshakov and Mesiatz work is that Russians are not ready for multi-culturalism and eclectics. A globetrotting tramp and omnisexual snob hopping planes and flip-flopping from a Mulatto girl to a Greek boy (because of his gay themes exploration, Pleshakov has been a welcomed guest in the avant-garde Mitin Zhurnal published in Prague) is not a common figure on Russian pages or plazas. However, this kind of egotistic egalitarian equally interested in French philosophy and fine dining, Russian slang and American slums and foreign airports and multi-lingual Internet portals is prominently featured in the writings of these two Russian Americans. The accessibility of these writers is also limited by the intended absence of a well-defined plot and the omnipresence of word play. Whereas a sophisticated reader prepared by thick thickets of Nabokov's Ada (this is what Treatment by Electricity reminds me of) or Burroughs's branchy boorishness (that's where Pleshakov draws his inspiration) can find these alcove authors a treasure, an average reader, unaccustomed to the concept that reading requires some preparation, will simply put these books down.

As for other émigré literati, the self-congratulatory atmosphere never leaves the crowded gatherings of these Broadway brodskovites, many of whom, using an expression of the writer Zinovii Zinik, turn exile into a literary exercise. Focused mainly on reflecting on their frontier experiences, such as visiting a welfare office or a food bank, working in brothels or brooding on a Salvation Army divan while composing divine poetry, or, even better, their sweet and sour Soviet childhood seen through the veil of volatile American life, they deny themselves unique voices, placing higher importance on the excruciating details of their expatriate existence instead of, simply, their stylistic expertise. One of the more notable books written in this genre is Poor Lass, or Apple, Hen, Pushkin by Yulia Belomlinskaya, a Russian who, having spent about fifteen years in New York, recently returned to St. Petersburg.

There is no need, however, to complain about the sparseness of Diaspora literature, since even in Russia, according to the critic Viacheslav Kuritsin, it is nearly impossible to find good mainstream prose. Another Russian critic, Dmitrii Bavilsky, echoes Kuritzyn, stating that Russian writers, skilled either in avant-garde confessional concoctions reminiscent of unedited diary entries or in disposable detective stories, cannot find a balance between the two. However, the problem probably lies not in the absence of good writers, but in an inability of critics and publishers to reach out to the creative talent residing outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Russian writers living abroad suffer most from this situation. It is my opinion that a writer must always be invigorated by eager readers, as sometimes a younger lover is needed to revive an otherwise reticent partner. The feedback of critics is a fertilizer that makes a writer more fruitful. With almost no Russian literary criticism present abroad, writers outside of Russia do not feel that their prose is needed and continue to write with no hope of seeing their work published. Perhaps, there is an underground genius somewhere in France or the U.S. jotting down his or her brilliant thoughts, but there is no way for us to know about that person, unless we solicit anthologies entries or sponsor some Internet contest such as Teneta or Russian America.

With a lack of information from distant territories, it is important for Slavists to stop relying only on a handful of advisers residing in these two cultural capitals and start checking out what is going on in New York and Riga, Berlin and Chelyabinsk, Almaty and Tashkent. The legendary city of Kitezh, which hid in a lake from the murderous, marauding Tartars, is there, but it is underwater and you need to dive deeply to get a closer look.

© M. Meklin

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