Thank you for the radishes: Edmund Wilson in dialogue with Helen Muchnic

 

In 1942, the literary critic and Princeton graduate, Edmund Wilson, then forty-seven, made friends with a scholar of Russian literature slightly younger than himself, Helen Muchnic. Born in Baku in 1902, Helen  emigrated to the US as a child; after an intensely illustrious academic career, she was teaching at the elite Massachusetts women's college, Smith. Wilson did not usually like academics, but he took a shine to Muchnic. They started exchanging letters - about Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev, everything and anything to do with Russian literature - as they would continue to do for the next thirty years, until Wilson's death in 1972 ('Do let us talk about Gogol when I see you. He is certainly a very strange man', Wilson wrote to Muchnic in 1943). 

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that would outlast many books by each of them, many of Wilson's affairs and at least one of his marriages. They soon progressed from Dear Miss Muchnic to Dear Helen, a level of familiarity that would endure (Wilson never signed off with his nickname 'Bunny', dropping his surname only in the final decade of their correspondence). At the time they met, Wilson was still married to his third wife, the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. By December 1942, Muchnic was a welcome guest at the Wilson-McCarthy household: on December 22 that year,Wilson sent her a telegram with instructions for reaching their home at Wellfleet, near the tip of Cape Cod, where he famously hid out from the hothouse of New York society. After catching various trains, Helen was to change onto a bus in Yarmouth: 'Mary will be on bus'. The mere idea of hailing a bus on which Mary McCarthy is already seated, to progress to an intimate dinner with the cream of East Coast intelligentsia, baffles my saurian brain. Yet, clearly, Helen Muchnic held her own, and brought vegetables, too. In summer 1943, Wilson followed up another dinner with this note:   

 'I have delayed answering your letter and thanking you for the radishes because I had to go away for a week and got no chance to write any letters. First of all, we were delighted with the radishes. I am especially fond of radishes, and these are the best I have had for years. When I was a child, I used to cut them in little slices and eat them on bread and butter, and I ate a great many of these that way (made the better part of a lunch and a supper on them). Many of the radishes you buy or get in restaurants have been allowed to get too big and coarse, and the taste is too sharp. You seem to have pulled these at just the right time'. 

The rest of the letter is about Thomas Hardy, Allen Tate, and Antigone. Later that same year Wilson added: 'We have been having a wonderful time with your vegetables. We have had some wonderful novelties such as Vichysoisse soup made out of sorrel or squash, and slices of squash fried or something in a way that is delicious. They really have been a great treat'. This letter has two added scribbles: a ragged one from Wilson about Dostoevsky's sense of humour, and a neat cursive addendum by Mary McCarthy: 'Edmund has already mentioned the vegetables to you - the lettuce was heavenly and this time came through well, Is the small spear-like one romaine or a new variety of lettuce?'  While there have been various accounts of the Wilson-McCarthy marriage and its discontents (including two by their son Reuel), their relationship has surely never been viewed before from the perspective of mutual salad appreciation. 

Several months after the radish and romaine revel, on October 23rd, Wilson invited Muchnic to see a version of Gogol's The Fair at Sorochinsk 'at the Russian ballet'; he asked her to queue for the tickets, but enclosed a cheque to cover the costs. As an apparent afterthought, he scrawled under his signature: 'They have offered me Clifton Fadiman's job reviewing books on the New Yorker, & I've decided to take it for a year, though I doubt whether anything good but money will come of it'. On August 7th, 1944, Wilson wrote to Helen: 'The Nabokovs are here in Wellfleet [...]. Vladimir & I have been giving each other quizzes on our respective languages. Here is one of his more interesting questions. How would you answer it? Put into Russian the following sentence: At the harbor I saw many masts and had many day-dreams (using мечта for day-dream)'. Thus, with a scribble and a pun or two, historic literary relationships were forged.

By February 1945, when Wilson was finishing a book (presumably Europe Without Baedeker) while managing New Yorker reviews, his tone regarding Mary had changed: '[...] don't take too seriously anything Mary may have said, when you saw her. Her way of seeing herself in a drama doesn't always make connections with reality. Lately she has been acting out a novel when she ought to be writing one'. By October that year, he confided that his teenage daughter 'Rosalind has just moved in with me and we have been having quite a good time together fixing the place up'; Muchnic was already settled in a senior position at Smith, where she had started as an instructor in Russian in 1930, aged 28. The following year, 1946, Wilson was trying to get a divorce so as to marry yet again, to Elena Mumm Thornton, of the Mumm champagne dynasty. Elena was a member of the Struve family and a native Russian speaker; her grandfather had been the Russian ambassador to Japan. In his letters to Muchnic, Wilson fretted that Mary might 'obstruct it' (the wedding) with more fuss 'in court over nothing'. Clearly, Mary was no longer on the bus. In May 1948 Wilson shared the news of his and Elena's new baby, and asked if Muchnic had heard that Vladimir Nabokov would soon start teaching Russian at Cornell ('They are immensely pleased about it , as it means a good salary, & it happens to be one of the only colleges where serious work with butterflies is done'). But by 1955, the friendship with Nabokov was challenged by Wilson's adverse reaction to Lolita: ‘I was disappointed in Volodya Nabokov’s new novel and for that reason I don’t think I’ll review it [in the New Yorker]’. It seems a shame that he couldn't have managed a concise review like that offered by Mr Brundish in Penelope Fitzgerald's tragic novella The Bookshop (1978): 'I have read Lolita, as you requested. It is a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it'. And of course, by 1963, Wilson and Nabokov were official literary enemies.

Muchnic and Wilson, by contrast, were still good chums; if anything, their friendship grew warmer, with Wilson signing off  'love, Edmund' (love was often sent to Muchnic's partner Dorothy as well); mansplaining to her how to write in the  'terse' style he preferred; and asking her views on exactly what Vronsky was thinking, among other burning Russian literary questions, to the very end. He even awarded her an unofficial prize for best Christmas card in 1956 (perhaps it featured seasonal radishes). Muchnic continued dedicating her books to him, to Wilson's mild disapproval (it meant he couldn't review them personally). In a somewhat enigmatic interlude, the manager of Fort Schuyler - a private gentleman's club in Utica, New York - wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1970 to follow up what he called a '"fender-bending" incident' in October 1969, 'involving your secretary's car and a parked car, [which] has not been resolved. [...] Apparently, through some oversight, Miss Helen Muchnic failed to turn in an accident report to her insurance company [...]. Anything you could do to speed this process up would be greatly appreciated'. Was Muchnic meeting Wilson at his club, and did she prang her car before or after lunch? Why was she described as Wilson's 'secretary', and why were her academic titles neatly elided? Possibly she was driving Wilson, who must have been frail and who would soon afterwards suffer a stroke, to his club. Wilson sent this note from the club manager to Muchnic, but although he scribbled on it, he confined his commentary to thoughts on 'the exiled Sinyavsky', so we remain no wiser about the fender-bender.

Wilson did his best to mentor Muchnic's career, suggesting to Yale that they should hire her (and Nabokov) as lecturers 'on special subjects', writing her a reference for Bennington College in Vermont in 1944 when she was evidently contemplating a sideways move (his daughter had studied there). In 1947, he congratulated Muchnic on the appearance of her book: 'Reading you has had the effect of making me want to go back to Russian literature'. This would have been her Introduction to Russian Literature, published by Doubleday in 1947. Later, he would call her 1961 book From Gorky to Pasternak: Six Writers in Soviet Russia 'the best book on the subject in any language'. However, Muchnic pursued a robust career at Smith - with cameos at other institutions, including Vassar, her undergraduate college, UCL SSEES in London, Bryn Mawr, where she took her PhD, and Yale (where she briefly taught) - without Wilson's patronage, rising by 1947 to full professor at Smith and becoming chair of Russian there in 1963, a position she held until her retirement in 1969. In fact, the patronage may have worked better the other way round; letters from 1966 seem to indicate that Muchnic may have recommended Wilson and McCarthy's son Reuel for teaching posts at Toronto and elsewhere (he eventually became a professor of Slavic literature at the University of Western Ontario). 

Muchnic must have encountered Sylvia Plath, since the latter studied at Smith between 1950 and 1955 and wrote her thesis on Dostoevsky. Muchnic was certainly friendly, over many years, with Vassar buddy Elizabeth Bishop, as correspondence in their respective archives (held at Smith and Vassar respectively) attests. Muchnic published three more books in the course of her long career (including Dostoevsky's English Reputation, which I have cited in my own work); besides her Wilson-invited reviews in the New Yorker, she also published extensively between 1968 and 1980 on Russian fiction in the iconic New York Review of Books (one 1977 headline reads, 'Was Gogol Gay?'). Muchnic spent most of her life in a relationship with a woman, her Smith colleague Dorothy Walsh; an orientation which very likely protected and prolonged her friendship with the notoriously philandering Wilson. She died in 2000. Predictably, most professional interest in Wilson's correspondence has focused on exchanges with fellow literary lions, like Nabokov (see Simon Karlinsky's Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971) or McCarthy. His long and low-profile friendship with Muchnic, however, offers insights into his lifelong enthusiasm for Russian language and literature, as well as unexpected angles on his career, his literary attachments, his family, and, of course, the radishes.

                                    

Acknowledgements: I thank Princeton University's Firestone Library for access to their archive of Wilson-Muchnic letters (1941-72, Boxes 1-2). This account may appear one-sided because the Firestone holds only Wilson's side of the correspondence; I am unclear whether Muchnic's letters to him have been preserved.

Friedrich Schiller's "Dmitry": The Executed Elephant

A long time ago on a famous writer's estate far, far away, I opened two attractive Russian hardback books I had just bought in Moscow. One was The Aviator by Evgenii Vodolazkin, a lyrical, elegiac, richly evocative and thoroughly enjoyable novel which would inspire me to write several articles and reviews about its author in the years to come. The other was Yuri Buida's The Fifth Kingdom, which could hardly have been more different - although also a historical novel of sorts, it was told by multiple narrators, set in the early seventeenth century, and bulging at the seams with homunculi, flying demons, and conspiracy theories. It was so exotic, it made Vodolazkin's fairy-tale of Stalinist cryogenics seem downright tame. I was hooked by the searing opening lines: 

They hanged the child on Monday and the executioner on Thursday; on Saturday, they put the elephant to death.

A snowstorm was whirling and night was drawing in; thus, when the elephant appeared between the Serpukhovsky Gates, observers did not understand at once the sort of monster that was approaching, a vast, dark figure, encircled by riders with torches and foot soldiers with spears and halberds. When the elephant drew closer, they could see that its spine and ears were heaped with snow, that tears had frozen in the folds under its eyes, and that its left tusk was broken off. Its trunk lay calmly on the shoulder of the Arab who was leading the beast towards an enclosure built on waste ground, not far from the cemetery where they buried unknown drunkards.

I resolved to translate The Fifth Kingdom if I could, but it took me several years to get around to the task; and just as my publisher and I thought we had secured funding in spring 2022, the main source of grants for literary translation from Russian, the Institut Perevoda, became ethically untouchable because of its status as a Russian government-supported institution. Putin had effectively slammed down the window on translating contemporary Russian novelists, as on so much else.

I put The Fifth Kingdom aside. But last week in London I found its characters coming to life again in my head, as I watched a performance of Peter Oswald's remarkable re-(co-?)writing of Friedrich Schiller's unfinished play Dmitry, or Demetrius (Schiller had barely finished writing the first act when he died in 1805). The play was set two hundred years earlier, during the Time of Troubles when Russia, weakened by famine and near-anarchy, was at the mercy of the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; also a time when, until the Tsar's line of succession was firmly re-established under Mikhail I, the first of the Romanov Tsars, a series of pretenders to the throne known as False Dmitrys kept popping up, with Polish support. Each pretender claimed to be Dmitry Ivanovich, Ivan the Terrible's youngest son. Although the real Dmitry had died at a tender age, possibly murdered by assassins hired by Boris Godunov, more likely of natural causes, this did not stop vast numbers of people from believing that he might have survived in hiding, under a false name, until the time was ripe for him to emerge and claim his throne. Schiller follows the historical storyline closely, and I didn't notice the join with Oswald's reconstruction of the second and final act of the play: Dmitry's rise to the throne, apparently by divine intervention, which is tragically undercut by the loss of "his" mother's support and the subsequent desertion of his Cossack allies (both the historical and the fictional false Dmitry actually occupied the throne of Moscow during 1605-6, until his murder by boyars).

At first, I was inclined to be underwhelmed by the production. The opening scene in the Sejm, where the Polish nobles debate whether or not to support Dmitry's claim to the Russian throne, was lively but unconvincing. Tom Byrne's Dmitry radiated a Zelensky vibe, all heartfelt and determined in army surplus camo. Aurora Dawson-Hunte as the Polish princess Marina Mnishek, daughter of Dmitry's main patron and his future wife, spoke her dullish lines with verve but lacked chemistry with her betrothed. However, the unpronounceable Polish Cardinal (James Garnon) displayed such Machiavellian flair, whether twirling in Satanic-red clerical regalia or reliving his military career in natty fatigues, that I was soon hypnotized by his Jesuitical scheming. And once the dynamic at the heart of the play - the tragic love of a mother for her son - was fully developed, I was lost, sobbing and blowing my trunk in a truly embarrassing way. Ivan IV's widow, Maria Nagaya played by Poppy Miller, mesmerized me with her hesitations and her commitments. Like her historical counterpart, the fictional Maria legitimizes her son by 'recognizing' him: there's a tense scene at the end of Act 1 where Maria meets the adult Dmitry for the first time. He burbles greetings and confessions to her, half-monarch, half-puppydog, entirely terrified of her reaction - since until that point, he  genuinely believed himself to be Dmitry. And she doesn't spare him: after a gruelling silence, she says, 'I recognize you. I recognize you... Your name was Yuri. You were Dmitry's little friend'. Before the shattering news has fully sunk in, Maria agrees to recognize the pretender publicly as her son - if only in order to revenge her true child's death (said sprog shown in the 1899 portrait below by Mikhail Nesterov, looking suitably saintly). The circumstances under which this pact disintegrates make up the play's action-packed second half.

Schiller, and Oswald, made me appreciate the Time of Troubles - and Buida's take on it in The Fifth Kingdom - in a new way. Observing the Cardinal's machinations, noting the growing resentment of the Cossacks and the dowager Queen, I could see how it was possible for the Romanov party to represent the pretenders' minions as an army of monsters and homunculi. I thought I spotted some intertextuality. I also wondered, not very originally, whether Dostoevsky was always anti-Catholic or whether his reading of Schiller made him so - certainly, between Dmitry's Cardinal and Don Carlos' Grand Inquisitor, Catholic clergy don't get a very good rep in these plays. You don't have to enjoy Dmitry with your historian's hat on, however. You can enjoy it as a melodrama, as a parable of the instability of identity, or as a comment on contemporary Russian political ambition (which is perhaps too obviously played up by the choice of certain uniforms and in the final lines, delivered by Romanov). 

You can catch Dmitry until 5 Nov at London's Marylebone Theatre (in the Steiner House, interestingly enough). But first, here's a little more from The Fifth Kingdom on Dmitry, Maria Mnishek, and that poor elephant:

The sky darkened, and the gloom sank into people’s hearts, suddenly reminding them that a whirlwind just like this had struck Moscow when the Pretender Dmitri had first entered the city last year. It was an evil sign, a malum omen…

Then abruptly, just as suddenly as it had risen, the wind dropped; a silence began, and in the middle of the deserted street the snow-white elephant appeared. People could not believe their eyes; they thought they were dreaming. The elephant might have been borne in on the wind. He reared up on his hind legs, tossed his trunk in the air and trumpeted and trumpeted, and people took this as a sign of the eye of God, like a voice summoning them to rejoicing and love. And then the elephant lowered himself in his stately way onto his knees and offered Marina Mnishek a cup of wine, using his trunk like a hand to hold it…

Slight, flat-chested, with thin lips and tiny teeth in a greedy, callous, vulpine face set on a blueish, childish neck, which barely supported the weight of her tall horsehair coiffure, clenched in a corset of Spanish steel, scared, confused, and ill-tempered, Marina stared in horror at the snow-white beast. It knelt and gazed at her with its childlike eyes.

And beside her, Tsar Dmitri also paused – a short man, broad-shouldered, beardless and smooth-cheeked, with two monstrous warts on his face, tiny eyes and no neck, his hands like the paws of a bear.

Everyone waited.

The silence stretched.

And suddenly Dmitri shook himself, sighed with relief, took the cup from the elephant and yelled in a high, quivering voice,

“Glory! Glory!”

Abruptly a cannon fired, and then another; horns sounded, a flute cut through the din, the Turkish drums rumbled, and all of a sudden the elephant began to dance. He flung his trunk high, curled it into a ring and snorted; he stood on his hind legs and trumpeted; he shifted from foot to foot and stretched his pig-like maw wide, as if smiling; he rose on his hind legs and spun, and spun. People gasped; cheerful again, they began to stir and chatter…

“Glory!” Dmitri yelled once more.

“Glory!” one of the archers took up the cry.

“Glory!” the crowd shouted joyously. “Glory!”

And once again the blue of the sky filled with dust, and again the gentle tinkle of bells sounded, and again Marina was the greatest beauty in the world, rouged and splendid, like Lady Luck herself, and Dmitri was a giant, a handsome hero, a mighty ruler, a knight, sovereign and conqueror of tongues and hearts…

Translation: mine, from Yuri Buida, The Fifth Kingdom (Piatoe tsarstvo), 2018

Visiting Vilnius: Pushkin and the Crack'd Mirror

On the edge of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a lovely forest park called Markučiai. It smells excitingly of moss and pine needles: as you wander across its intricate, sloping paths, you discover fishing lakes, a tiny chapel surrounded by a handful of graves, and a museum dedicated to Aleksandr Pushkin. This last might well give the visitor pause. Was Pushkin ever in Vilnius? No, although his celebrated great-grandfather was (see more below). Then why a museum in his name? I went inside to find out. At first sight, the museum appeared to be closed, and the information boards arranged between the house and the park were all in Lithuanian, a beautiful but rather opaque language. After puzzling over the pictures on the boards for a while, I tried the door. It opened, and a small fierce lady with black-button eyes, built rather along the lines of a matrioshka doll, peered at me through a tarnished glass window. In a corridor off to one side, another woman was speaking loudly to tourists in a language I couldn't follow. On my left was a dining room with a polished dark wooden table, surrounded by equally dark, ornate, rather brooding dressers, the knobs on the drawers carved like the heads of friendly gargoyles. Somehow I felt I'd fallen back in time, perhaps into a Dovlatov story. "Do you speak English?" I ventured. "Russkii?"

As if summoned specially to rescue me, another member of the museum staff appeared - a very kind and encyclopaedically informed lady from St Petersburg, Ellina by name. Ellina generously gave up what must have been an hour to show me the whole museum, from the furniture in the dining room (Pushkin's own, brought from Mikhailovskoe) to the clay golden cockerels and cats made by local children after reading Pushkin's fairy tales. She also explained the mystery of the museum dedicated to Pushkin in a city the poet had never visited: it was not Aleksandr himself, but his younger son Grigorii who had lived in the house. Grigorii married Varvara Melnikova, the daughter of a retired Russian general and the niece of Russia's first Minister for Transport, Pavel Melnikov. The Melnikov brothers were attracted to the Markučiai estate by the very factor which deterred other buyers: the construction of a new railway along its edge. Varvara received the estate as her dowry. After she divorced her philandering first husband, she met Grigorii Pushkin in Petersburg, where he held an administrative post and also curated his late father's estate. By the time they married in 1883, Grigorii was nearly fifty; Varvara twenty-eight. It was his first marriage, her second. They had no children together, but by all accounts their wedded life was blissful. For the first fifteen years they lived at Mikhailovskoe; then, after Grigory managed to sell the estate to the Russian Academy of Sciences, they settled at Markučiai. Sadly, after only six years in Lithuania, Grigorii died. Varvara remained at the house, except during the war, until her death in 1935; her dearest wish was for her property to continue to honour her extraordinary father-in-law by preserving Grigorii's relics of Mikhailovskoe. And while some items have been lost, many remain. The house is still magical, with the view from the first-floor balcony almost unchanged; Varvara's oils, mostly portraits of grazing cattle, survive on the living-room walls; and many fascinating books and trinkets from both families on display. I was no longer in a short story by Dovlatov, but possibly Chekhov.

Most of all, I was enchanted by the looking-glass. This is a large swing mirror placed at the end of a narrow corridor; the glass shines within a square mahogany frame, reflecting a distinguished bust of the poet. A large crack festooned with tiny pieces of Scotch tape runs drunkenly across one upper corner, a legacy of over-enthusiastic late Soviet remont. But what almost literally enchanted me about this mirror was Ellina's words: this was Aleksandr Pushkin's mirror, or rather his mother's, brought from Mikhailovskoe with other treasures by the poet's dutiful younger son. Pushkin the child had looked into this mirror; possibly played divination games with it, gadanie, as Tatiana and her girlfriends do in Evgenii Onegin. The young dandy Pushkin had been reflected in this mirror; perhaps he'd stopped in front of it to whisk his cravat impatiently into shape, many times during his two-year exile at his mother's estate, in between penning his first great prose works. I stared into the mirror intently, willing Pushkin to swim up out of the depths. Tears sprang involuntarily to my eyes. I was so close to Pushkin. I'd read this story. Hell, I'd translated this story...

Some dreadful force was pulling him closer and closer to the mirror's yellowed, lacklustre surface. Suddenly he shuddered... he saw too alien, utterly frenzied eyes fixed on him. At the same instant he felt a sharp jerk. His mirror double had seized his right hand and forcefully tugged it under the surface of the mirror, triggering circles of ripples as if across a pool of mercury... (Aleksandr Chaianov, The Venetian Mirror)

Well, maybe not like that, but there are alternatives...

I stepped forwards and stared greedily into the depths of the mirror. My heart skipped, as though a powerful hand had gripped it; I cried out. I ran from Signora Moricci’s house, like one trying to outrace mortal danger.  (Pavel Muratov, The Venetian Mirror)

I stretched out my hand and touched the wood... I touched the glass... Ellina had disappeared on an errand, and there was no-one around except me, the mirror, and possibly Pushkin. I gazed hard into the dimness beyond my reflection, but no mercurial fingers rose from the depths to meet mine. If Pushkin was in there, he wasn't coming out to play. 

As I mentioned above, Grigorii was not the first member of the Pushkin clan to be linked with Vilnius. The poet's great-grandfather, Abram Gannibal, a military engineer and translator celebrated as Peter the Great's African (as in the title of Robert Chandler's new edited collection of Pushkin's prose experiments for NYRB Classics), was baptized at an Orthodox Church in the Old Town. The stele commemorating this event can still be seen on the church exterior.

And as for me, like Pushkin's Tatiana, I'm still wishing for a magic reflection:

Татьяна на широкой двор

В открытом платьице выходит,

На месяц зеркало наводит;

Но в темном зеркале одна

Дрожит печальная луна...

**The citations above are from my short story anthologies Red Spectres and White Magic respectively. You can buy them on Amazon or from the publisher websites via the hyperlinks. As for the final citation, this is from Book Five of Eugene Onegin, translated thus by Charles Johnston (not the best translation but the only one to hand): 'Tatyana in low-cut attire / goes out into the courtyard spaces / and trains a mirror till it faces / the moon; but in the darkened glass / the only face to shake and pass / is sad old moon'. **

A brave statement from author Anna Starobinets

 As a translator of Russian literature, I'm used to silence. My work is rarely published, my few readers rarely cite my words, and if they do, they might not credit me: if I've done my job right, they forget I exist.  But now, for the first time, I have reason to be silent; to be ashamed, even afraid of admitting what I do. Because of the tragically misguided decision of the current Russian government to invade Ukraine, and the war crimes committed by Vladimir Putin's orders even as I write this, 'Russian' is becoming a pariah word. Now is not the time to talk about Russian literature, some say; and certainly not to publish it, or to support its translation.

Thankfully, some people cannot be silent. Tolstoy couldn't. Not when he saw injustice in his own country, committed by an unelected government and without a free media to report it. Sound familiar? Anna Starobinets cannot be silent either. If you haven't heard of Anna before, or read any of her excellent work in the English of Jane Bugaeva, translator of Anna's engaging children's novels; or her fiction for adults translated by Jamie Rann and Hugh Aplin; or her heartbreaking memoir of loss translated by Katharine E. Young, read her statement below and see why you've been missing out. 

Statement by Anna Starobinets about the war in Ukraine

[This statement was posted in Russian on Facebook on March 11, 2022, and later translated into English by Muireann Maguire]

“But who needs you, anyway!” say my elderly relatives. “Live quietly in Russia. Just keep your mouth shut.” Of course, they mean something else – that as long as I gag myself with a metaphorical handkerchief, no-one will threaten me – but there’s still truth in their words. I’m not needed any more. Not needed anywhere. Neither “here”, nor “there”. I’m not needed “here”, because I call the war what it is: war. Because I insist that the people of Ukraine are peaceful, not fascists. People who are being bombed by my own homeland, controlled now by a crazy psychopath. I’m not needed “there”, because now I carry the mark of Cain. Of someone who kills his own brother every day. Because I am from Russia.

What can I do? Stay in Russia, take to the streets every day with those who are brave enough? Get beaten in the face and kidney-punched? Get sent to prison for three years, or twenty years? Probably not twenty, of course. Three is more likely. And for the first offence, just two weeks or so. But I can’t do it. I cannot bear to leave my children. They have no-one in the world but me.

What can I do? Stay in Russia, and remain silent? Become part of it? No, I can’t do that either.

What can I do? Go elsewhere, lose everything? Everything except the shreds of my self-respect, and my children. That’s my choice. I’ve made it – and left.

I’ve come, first, to Sri Lanka. I booked and paid for this trip in the happy days before the war: I wanted to see the jungle animals, because my next Beastly Crimes children’s book is meant to be set in a jungle. Coconuts, apes, elephants, heat – I feel feverish; delirious. The jungles of Sri Lanka symbolize my homelessness. I see an elephant – and I remember I no longer have a home. I see a palm tree – and I remember I’ve given up my beloved apartment in Khamovniki, Moscow. Here I see apes – and there, my friends are packing up my life into cardboard boxes. I see snakes – and I have enough money for three months, at most. Coconuts, ripe to pluck – and I’ve left my parents and my friends. Here’s the new moon, lying on its back; and I have no idea what to do for the rest of my life.

From here we’ll move on to Georgia. Then, maybe, to Montenegro. Farther on, I see only fog: thick, like the mist above jungle pools at six in the morning.

This is the choice I have made. Silence, for me, is the very worst. The only thing I can do well is string words together in Russian. That’s all I have. I’ll comfort myself that I can still do this when far away. Perhaps I’ll be more useful like this for toppling the regime, than if I shut my mouth or went to prison. Maybe the same children who read my Beastly Crimes will do something when they grow up. Since I couldn’t do it. Since we couldn’t.

With these words, I burn my bridges. My sympathy: for Ukraine. My respect: for those who remain, to fight on.

Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland.
Der Eichenbaum
wuchs dort so hoch, die Veilchen nickten sanft –
es war ein Traum.
Das küßte mich auf deutsch und sprach auf deutsch
(man glaubt es kaum,
wie gut es klang) das Wort: “Ich liebe dich” –
es war ein Traum.

(Heine, 1832)

Anna, as she tell us, cannot be silent. By speaking out on social media, and by asking me to translate her words into English so that they would reach a wider audience, she has cut off her entire life, her  income, her main readership (think how much that hurts a writer), her support networks. Frankly, under the same circumstances, I think I'd shut up. I know other Russian writers who have chosen silence; we cannot judge them. But we can judge our own choices. For too long, Western society has been silent about writing from Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, by failing to read it; by failing to understand it; by over-politicizing it; by under-politicizing it. Readers don't choose Eastern European literature, so commercial publishers in the West rarely fund translation from these languages independently. The end result has been to throw an entire industry sector on the mercy of the Russian government's opaquely filtered funds; funds which are now likely to prove both unavailable and untouchable. Not every political statement can be translated pro bono in a few hours; and the first English translation of Zamyatin's great dystopian novel We didn't sell enough copies even to earn back its production costs). If no replacement grants for Russian literary translation is found, and if readers are not found to fill the gap commercially, then translation will cease to be funded.  Yet if translators fall silent in the English-speaking West, so will Russophone writers like Anna, like Alisa Ganieva (whose husband has been arrested for protesting in Moscow), like Mikhail Shishkin (who distanced himself from the Russian government in 2013, a year before the invasion of Crimea), like Andrei Kurkov, a proud Ukrainian who writes in Russian.

 Don't let that happen. If you have a choice, don't choose silence.  

Disclaimer:  I have reviewed Anna's memoir Look At Him, and chaired an online talk about it where Anna spoke vividly despite having Covid at the time; and finally, I wrote an essay about Anna's science fiction for the LA Review of Books. This year, I was hoping - I am still hoping - to invite Anna to my University to participate in a seminar about coping with child loss. 

Punishing the Hunter - Not the Reader

Yulia Yakovleva is one of the most entertaining and deft contemporary writers working in Russian today: she hops with agility between YA literature (we loved her The Raven's Children, which was longlisted for the 2020 Read Russia Prize) and adult detective thrillers like Punishment of a Hunter (Pushkin Vertigo, 2021) - although both titles we've so far have been set in the early Soviet period. There's plenty of political idealism, casual animosity, frustration, and filth to enjoy - I particularly appreciated the details in Punishment of a Hunter about the sheer difficulty of getting laundry done in a communal apartment. But while there's a wealth of Communist social context to enjoy, you may well find the plot too engrossing to notice - as Yakovleva's hero, Leningrad police detective Vasily Zaitsev, tries to solve a series of grisly crimes committed in his city. 

Meanwhile, I was trying to solve the mystery of why this excellent crime novel is called Punishment of a Hunter instead of The Leningrad Murders or Comrade Death or some such similarly suggestive, run-of-the-crime-mill name. The Russian title - literally, Suddenly Out the Hunter Runs - didn't help me either. Only as I approached the end did everything make sense - odd title, cute illustrations adorning every new chapter, and the oddly recurring theme of Dutch Masters in the Hermitage Museum. I can't explain without spoilers, so I'll summarize by calling Yakovleva's novel an ek-phras-tastic thriller: an honest, much-wronged detective lead recalling the excellent Arkady Renko of Martin Cruz Smith's late-Soviet crime series, a macabre serial killer who could have dropped out of a Chris Carter novel, and a setting straight out of one of Bulgakov's communal-apartment comedies. There's even a basis in historical fact for the big reveal (if not for the serial killings).

This is a novel where names, especially traditional 'speaking names' that reveal information about their bearer's character - are important, and Yakovleva's translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp has done a splendid job with this. She kept the hero's name, Zaitsev (a relatively common Russian surname) although English readers lose the subtle association with the hare (zaets), a game animal which features in the titular Dutch canvas by Paulus Potter (and hence the theme of the hunter becoming the hunted, important for Yakovleva's plot, is harder to discern). Another, less savoury detective is called Kishkin in the original (which evokes Tripes or Offal for the Russian reader); Ahmedzai Kemp smoothly changed this to the similarly evocative 'Uglov'. It's a 'speaking name' that works well in English, and one could certainly argue that this novel has quite enough evisceration going on already. I particularly enjoyed Ahmedzai Kemp's lively touch with dialogue, which always sounded vivid and real. There's a wonderful exchange between Zaitsev and a 'cabbie' (izvozchik), who, like all taxi drivers since the dawn of time, draws him into a political discussion. Zaitsev tries to close this down by trotting out some formulaic Sovietese: 'I'm just setting out the political situation in the country'. In Ahmedzai Kemp's translation, the cabbie responds, 'Ooh, check you out. Where you from then?' The original has 'Ty otkuda gramotnyi-to takoi' (Or, 'Where was it you learned to speak like that'?). I normally like my translations literal, but I admired the chutzpah of that 'Check you out'. It brought the cabbie to life in my head - just as any well-written text should achieve for its characters.

Pushkin Press are doing a laudable job of commissioning translations of crime fiction (including vintage detectives) from several languages through their Vertigo series: if you like historical crime, intelligent Russian fiction and a Soviet setting, check it out. It's worth hunting down.