Review

Sergey Gandlevsky
Translated by Susanne Fusso
(Cornell University Press, 2019) $19.95

Circa 1970, a twenty-year-old poet reads and meets a first-rate dissident poet in Moscow . Krivorotov is smart enough to recognize that he himself is and will likely always be a second-rater, comparatively: “Krivorotov rhymed as if he were climbing a flight of stairs, guided by the bend of the railing. But Chigrashov used rhyme for balance, the way a tightrope walker uses his pole, and he slid by unsteadily, high up above, grinning with fear and daring.” (87). Lev Krivorotov is also smart enough to fall for the right women, but he is a second-rater there, too, losing them both, in one way or the other, to Viktor Chigrashov.

Illegible (the original title in Russian, НРЗБ, is an acronym for “illegible”) is made up of four parts, the first and third of which are told in the third-person, while parts two and four are told in the first-person by Krivorotov at the turn of the twenty-first century; he is now an academic and poet known primarily for his association with the late Chigrashov.

Gandlevsky (born 1952) is a renowned poet of whom I had never heard until now. His poems, some of which I’ve now read, have won awards in Russia, where he still lives. This is Gandlevsky’s first novel as such (published in Russian in 2002), though his Trepanation of the Skull (1996) is what he calls an “autobiographical novel.” I haven’t read the Czech Milan Kundera for 20 years, but Illegible is similar to Kundera’s novels about vain frustrated young men who amusingly (to us) and unhappily (to themselves) realize their mortality and smallness: “Here you stand, fifty years old and woebegone, looking at your own fate like a helpless divinity who can see all the interrelations but is powerless to change anything!” (46)

But Illegible is better than what I remember of Kundera, as Gandlevsky takes pleasure in everyday life. The city that Krivorotov experiences is an actual Moscow and not a dreamscape or stand-in for the world; the characters stand for themselves, not as abstractions of the author. The young man’s reverence for Chigrashov is wholly sympathetic and understandable: “Krivorotov looked around the room with the eyes of someone on a tour. So here is where it was all written. At this desk, placed endwise to the window. And here’s what the person writing sees from the window when he gets distracted, has a smoke, or is searching for a rhyme.” (110)

Such is the art of Gandlevsky’s fiction that we see Chigrashov and the two women somehow more clearly and sympathetically and vitally than Krivorotov does. And while Krivorotov is a sad sack, the novel is not sad. It is cheerful, and Gandlevsky’s teasing tone about youthful ideals and pretensions is, in the mode of Chekhov and of Gandlevsky’s inspiration, Pushkin, rather kindly.

Before I started reading, I wondered how there could be a need for 164 notes to a short realistic novel, but Fusso’s notes are actually helpful and interesting, especially as they’re regularly supplemented by Gandlevsky’s own unpretentious and always engaging commentary and explanations that he provided Fusso as she worked on the excellent translation. Illegible feels like a most readable collaboration.

The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia,1960-1990

By Peter Reddaway
Brookings Institution Press
320 pages, hardcover, $29.99

Peter Reddaway was an undergraduate studying Russian at Cambridge when he first visited the USSR in 1960.

He recalls the happy road-trip he took that summer with medical students and again with friends the following summer, when he began gleaning in various regions the independent thought of the Soviet citizens he encountered. Then, as a Harvard graduate student at Moscow State University, researching Soviet literature post-1956, he became excited by what he recognized as resistance among brave academics and intellectuals, among them survivors of the Gulag: “It was evident to me, as an outside observer, that in the period of my first Moscow sojourn from September 1963 to April 1964, Soviet society was moving toward becoming a seedbed for the emergence of samizdat and the expression of public dissent.” 

Thrown out of the USSR by officials who suspected him of encouraging the wife of an emigre to leave the country, Reddaway soon did seemingly as much as any outsider could to distribute and publicize samizdat: “I saw my job as doing what nobody else did on a regular basis: reporting on and disseminating as rapidly as possible the dissident information of various kinds that I obtained …”

He also highlighted the plight of the USSR’s ethnic and religious minorities, which he recounts by focusing on his efforts for Ukrainians, Jews and Crimean Tatars. He concentrated also on the USSR’s and now Russia’s misuse of psychiatry to institutionalize ordinary people whose only mental illness is resistance to arbitrary laws. He was finally able to return to the USSR in 1988 during Gorbachev’s years of perestroika and see again the country and meet some of the dissidents his publicity and advocacy had helped.

The writing of this memoir is neat, efficient, factual, careful but close-lipped, and interesting but never exciting. Reddaway, now retired from academia and the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC, presents, in large part, a review rather than a narrative, summations rather than dramatizations. One can almost see him checking off his voluminous curriculum vitae.

Reddaway is, somehow, modest about his large role (a decidedly British approach) and distributes praise and thanks to numerous fellow activists and of course the dissidents, among them Andrei Sakharov. The book’s theme, as he concludes, concerns “the rise, despite official persecution, of independent thinking and action over a period of nearly thirty years.”

The Dissidents should send us back to Reddaway’s many writings (cited within) that were done in the midst of the Cold War, when the dissolution of the Soviet empire did not look like a sure thing.