Reviews by Robert Blaisdell
This volume collects the poet Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin’s recollections of his encounters with the poets Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva and the full-length memoir of his friendship with the novelist and journalist Vasily Grossman.
The softspoken, careful, sympathetic Lipkin (1911-2003) earned a degree in engineering. But, as a master of Turkic, Persian and native languages, he made his living as a literary translator.
He kept his own poems to himself, suspecting that they would be censored, sharing them only with a small, trustworthy, admiring circle of friends, until it was safe to publish them – when he was seventy! Lipkin’s poetry was greatly admired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky. Here is a fine one translated by Robert Chandler:
The scholar Donald Rayfield, in his introduction, writes: “Under Stalin, Lipkin remained, by some miracle, an honest intellectual and an observant Jew, seeking neither approval nor martyrdom.” He judges that Lipkin and his wife, the poet Inna Lisnyanskaya (1928-2014), “formed one of the most extraordinary couples in the history of Russian literature.”
Lipkin’s recollections of his famous contemporaries are quiet and personally modest; he is generous towards them, and, as necessary, forgiving, which was necessary because Grossman, for one, could be harsh and unfair:
But they made up—because of Lipkin’s understanding of his friend’s frustrations. Lipkin was that loyal friend we all hope to have who forgives our impetuosity and tactlessness – and who himself is never seemingly impetuous or tactless. “As his only surviving friend,” Lipkin wrote in 1984, “his closest for over twenty years, I feel I have to draw something of a portrait of him, even if there are things I still can’t say.” After Lipkin helped Grossman travel to Armenia, Grossman wrote Lipkin a series of excellent, enthusiastically descriptive letters (which Lipkin quotes at length).
Understanding of human frailty, Lipkin is careful in his condemnations. He acknowledges the difficulties for the literary establishment, for example the editor of Novy Mir, Aleksander Tvardovsky, to remain staunch and brave in the context of Stalinist and post-Stalinist bureaucracy, where an unacceptable opinion or statement of fact that was published could be punished with death or the Gulag.
Grossman is Testimony’s primary subject, and Lipkin appreciatively recounts Grossman’s celebrated career and expertly evaluates his books. He tells the inside story of the persecution (“arrest,” as he says) of much of the work Grossman wrote after the Great Patriotic War, notably Life and Fate, which has since earned a glowing reputation. Discouraged by Soviet censorship, shunned by many of his former friends and disciples, Grossman died of cancer in 1964. Lipkin concludes: “I ask God to forgive me when I say Grossman was a saint.”
[1] Rambling at the Bridgehead. bit.ly/rl2403-lipkin
Spring in Siberia is in the mode of all Russian coming-of-age classics. The narrator Alexey recounts his childhood in the town of Taiga in an industrialized region near Novosibirsk. The boy’s most glorious days, however, are the summers he remembers spending with his babushka, his father’s mother, in a remote coal-mining village in the early 1990s. Despite hardships, his ever-resourceful grandmother finds ways to appreciate nature’s bounty and the gifts of everyday life, including TV: “I loved watching my grandmother watching television. She grew up without it and so she treated it with great respect and trust. Every newscaster who said, ‘Good evening, my name is …’ would receive a loud, ‘Good evening, and I’m Zoya!’ from my grandmother.”
Mozgovoy divides the novel in two; the first half of Part 1 is especially evocative, particularly in reference to this grandmother, who, perhaps because she hasn’t grown up in Siberia, is able to experience and communicate a feeling that Alexey has never imagined: “She smiled and drew a picture in my mind that I have never let go of since: a young girl with a long braid of rye hair riding bareback, holding the horse by its mane along the riverbank. In the moment of telling me about that, her face had an expression that I’d never seen before. Later I learned the word nostalgia, and I think what I saw then was just that. Nostalgia.”
Unathletic, inclined to artistic and creative pursuits, Alexey faces the rejection of his conventional father, and then as an adolescent the usual cruelties and bullyings of other boys. In Part 2, after his parents’ separation and his and his mother’s move to the city, he attends a competitive high school where he studies journalism. A well-connected classmate, Andrey, befriends him and opens his eyes to the limitations of Siberia and Russia; they share the hope and imagination that will take them away from there. Playing hooky one day: “… we stuck to the ski trails, our legs sinking knee-deep in the snow every now and then, and when I looked back, I saw that the skiers’ two perfectly parallel lines—lines destined never to meet—had now been rearranged into a chaotic, criss-crossing tangle of footprints.” That “criss-crossing tangle” is a metaphor for the teenagers’ relationship. When Andrey expresses his love for him, Alexey is flattered but frightened. Then, when the two manage to take a poky one-week European bus holiday through Poland, Germany, France and Holland, Alexey has to decide whether to escape Russia with his friend, or return to dismal, repressive Siberia.
It is the year 2000. Alexey explains: “No Ellen DeGeneres had ever appeared all gay and proud on our televisions. Even Elton John and Freddie Mercury were still straight in Russia. There was no information of such a kind – of that kind – available to the simple folk of our country.”
In the best Russian literary tradition, Mozgovoy expresses the perceptions of one keenly conscious, conflicted person. Alexey’s mother becomes, to Alexey’s surprise and ours, heroic in her loving acknowledgement of who he is: “My mother! My most precious, my most treasured mother. From where, how, from what wondrous sources could she possibly draw this deepest love, this limitless kindness, this overpowering all-acceptance? Given her living without a moment of security, given her wretched upbringing in a run-down village, her four younger siblings, each from a different man unknown to the family, her communist schooling, her country torn apart by the KGB and the mafia […], given all of that … from what possible source could this Altay orphan, this Soviet, jobless engineer, this single, singular Russian woman, my mother, have gained this understanding, most beautiful soul?”
Alexey has studied English from workbooks since boyhood, and the author himself, born the same year as Alexey (1985) writes in his own comfortable English. Mozgovoy completed this book after leaving Russia in 2011, fearful for his life after the most depraved man in the world, Vladimir Putin, instituted especially severe anti-gay laws. Mozgovoy now lives and writes in Belgium.
Platonov’s sensibility is peculiar and charmingly disarming: “… there was something else that Dvanov wanted to remember, but the effort was heavier than the memory, and his thought disappeared round a bend of consciousness in sleep, like a bird from a wheel beginning to turn.” Chevengur’s narrator is like an absent-minded observer who drifts occasionally into inspired, naïve, beautiful poetry: “Once he had left the city, Chepurny felt freer and more intelligent. Before him, once again, lay calming space. This man from Chevengur did not like forests, hills, and buildings. What he liked was the earth’s even belly, sloping against the sky, inhaling the wind and yielding a little beneath the weight of a foot-walker.” In the midst of the Russian Civil War, dutiful communists have built Chevengur, a village on the southern steppe. Various cartoonish characters have farcical adventures there.
Sometimes the novel feels as if Platonov (1899-1951) was not turning pages as he composed it over the summer of 1927 to May 1929, but watching it on an internal movie screen and then recording it. “Seeing his face in the glass of the locomotive headlamps, he would say to himself, ‘Would you believe it! Soon I’ll be dying, but I’m still the same as ever.’” Part of the comedy is that the narrator and the characters don’t always know what’s going on in their own heads: “Many things slipped past Dvanov’s poor and narrow mind; even his own life often flowed around it, like a stream around a rock.”
It’s difficult to compare Chevengur to other odd, inspired, comically inclined novels, but I’ll try. It’s not episodic in the Don Quixote sense, nor is it quite a roll-along travel-show like Dead Souls. Sasha, when he is a child living an orphan’s existence in a tiny village, seems at first as if he will be the primary character: “His grief was wordless, lacking any consciousness of the rest of life […]; the way he sorrowed for his dead father, the dead man might well have felt happy.” Platonov, however, seems to lose his interest in Sasha after he grows up and discovers the new world of Soviet Russia and ultimately the village of Chevengur.
Platonov wanders along, finding and abruptly introducing new characters the way certain dogs will tag along with almost anybody, but stays with no one for very long. Once the village of Chevengur has been set up and moved about, like a play-set, there even arrives a mysterious cast of so-called “others” (indistinct human-like beings, their identification as “others” always italicized).
I don’t recommend reading this immense book in short stretches, which, when I got bogged down in the middle, I unfortunately did. The novel’s movement is not in action so much as in comic improvisation – with occasional inexplicable violence (most notably in the haunting, nightmare-like massacre by Chekhists of Chevengur’s supposed kulaks). In Platonov’s cartoonish world, we blink and chortle but don’t much feel, and neither do the characters seem to feel anything for long.
At its best, Chevengur is a book of fanciful and delightful observations: “There is little real difference between clear consciousness and the vision of dreams – what happens in dreams is the same life, only with its meaning laid bare.” It’s as if Platonov wrote Chevengur in order that just such insights could come to him. For confused readers (if you pay attention, you’ll be confused), the veteran translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler append 220 extensive notes on the novel’s places, persons and things.
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