Extras Included {Book Review}

SIDETRACKED: EXILE IN HOLLYWOOD

Alexander Voloshin
Translated and introduced by Boris Dralyuk
Paul Dry Books; 98 pp.; $17.95

The Ukrainian-born Alexander Voloshin’s “mock epic” of Russian émigré life in Los Angeles in the late 1920s and the 1930s has the great advantage of the Ukrainian-born Boris Dralyuk introducing and translating it. “How would he regard himself now?” Dralyuk wonders. “Would he, like most Russian speakers in Ukraine today, draw a firm line and declare himself Ukrainian? I suspect he might, but I can’t be sure. What I am sure of, however, is that the plight of Ukrainian refugees would remind him of his own experiences in the 1910s and ‘20s. He would, I venture, see those refugees as his true ‘compatriots’ — not simply because they come from the geographic region he himself called home, but because, like him, they have been cruelly ‘liberated’ by a senseless war.”

Voloshin (c. 1884-1960) left Russia in 1918 in the midst of the civil war. Dralyuk clarifies that “Voloshin saw himself as a patriotic Russian Imperial subject but he was proud of his Ukrainian heritage and was happy to see Ukrainian culture flourish at this tumultuous time.” War, apparently, was as stupid then and its martial leaders as asinine as now:

Nothing in life is new, or lasts …
Beginnings fade into the past,
ends weave themselves into beginnings …
There—crowns go flying off and spinning
into the void and thrones are razed;
here—laws are trampled and some crazed
loony takes on the World entire!
War, with its bloody wind and fire,
again has set the globe aglow …
One thinks: “There’s simply no salvation!”
And wonders: “Where am I to go?
What route is safe these days? What station?” [Part 2, Chapter 15]

After five years on the worldwide immigrant trail, Voloshin arrived in New York in 1923, before heading west. Marrying now and again, he wrote for Russian-language American newspapers and, in L.A., as the almost happy-go-lucky narrator has it, acted as an extra in countless (but mostly untraceable) Hollywood movies: “Why be ashamed? What’s the big deal? / I earn a little ‘pocket money,’ / which keeps my disposition sunny.” [Part 2, Ch. 8]

Dralyuk, citing seemingly all the scarce scholarship on the Russian diaspora in Hollywood, includes photos of Voloshin in various film stills and explains: “Although the vast majority of the nearly two million people who fled the collapsing Russian Empire in the 1910s and 1920s wound up in Europe, Asia, New York, and San Francisco, a small number—no more than 5,000—eventually made it to Los Angeles. Here they tried to capitalize on the brief vogue for all things ‘Russian’ […] and also, inevitably, by offering themselves up to the studios.” Dralyuk adds: “There were frustratingly few authors among these Hollywood emigres. One bright exception is Alexander Voloshin.” (Dralyuk found and translated other “bright exceptions” in his own excellent My Hollywood and Other Poems.)

Voloshin is continually amusing and informative, most engagingly about those émigré actors:

I think I’ll lay out, if I may,
a common extra’s “working day”:
It’s seven-thirty—bored, depressed,
he eats his breakfast, then gets dressed,
but still has plenty of time to kill …

And then, after he has snagged a small part, we learn of “a common extra’s”  common frustration:

Watching the screen at the Apollo,
he finds he’s nowhere to be found!
They’ve cut him out of it, the clowns …
He didn’t count on such a blow—
they didn’t even let him know […]
Another victim of fate’s whim …
How rude! You suffer for your art
and in the end they scrap your part … [Part 2, Ch. 9]

Perhaps such disappointments led to Voloshin’s émigré-narrator’s reflection that “We only love, only hold dear / the scenes that vanish, disappear.” [Part 2, Ch. 13]

Dralyuk says “the poem might be called a ‘novella in verse,’ as it was likely inspired, at least in part, by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Our poet eschews the sonnet-like Onegin stanza, however, opting instead for Hudibrastic couplets — an ideal form, both in Russian and English, for his satiric take on the plight of Imperial Russia’s vanquished warriors and humiliated refugees.” Voloshin published Sidetracked as На путях и перепутьях: Досуги вечерние: Европа Америка, 1921-1952, in San Francisco in 1953. Dralyuk has rescued Voloshin’s little prize, never before translated into English, from oblivion.

– Bob Blaisdell