Whimsy in the face of chaos as Russian history repeats itself (Books & Opera - The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, There Once Lived a Mother.... by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Dmitri Shotakovch)

Today, as more than 50,000 Russians march to honor Boris Y. Nemtsov, the Putin critic who was assassinated a few days ago, it seems timely to consider some of the art made in the context of Soviet and Russian regimes, which may be different for the name they give their ruler but seem alike in their repression of opposing views.  While Putin is stripping off his shirt and getting into bed with the oligarchs, politically repressing homosexuals, and annexing Crimea as the Empress Catherine the Great did before him, I read The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, written by Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian living in Paris in the late 1940s, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Live a Mother Who Loved her Children, Until They Moved Back In, three novellas about Soviet Life written between 1988 and 2002, and I saw the 1934 Shotakovich opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Metropolitan Opera.

These three works plumb life's extremities, attempting the creation of some kind of meaning in the face of the suffering endured by the artist.  So we can thank repressive regimes for that literary construct we call the Russian soul.  Each of these works express deep longing for something better. 

A revolution without a cause (Theatre - Neva by Guillermo Calderon)

Neva, by Chilean writer and director Guillermo Calderon, is about making drama in the context of revolution.  It is set in 1905, when the Czar's troops murdered civilians for demonstrating, an event that likely helped sow the seeds of the 1917 revolution. The great playwright Anton Chekhov has just died of tuberculosis.  His wife comes to St. Petersberg, still mourning him, to rehearse his Cherry Orchard.  What is the meaning of their drama made of personal loss and love when there is real drama, with life and death stakes, taking place in the street outside?  The actors demand scenes of each other, they concoct emotions from fantasy in order to escape the pain of their lives.  Then they just a quickly knock their fantasies down, criticize each other, and turn to gossip.  The turn-on-a-dime rollercoaster ride demanded of the cast would provide for tour-de-force peformances, but the cast is a little long on effort and a little short on real feeling.  The question of the uses of drama is a provocative one to ask in a theatre, with your play as the means of asking it, but I imagine it would have been very different to ask it in Chile. Because here one has no revolutions in the street. People make fortunes to live in Brooklyn, stress about their carbon footprints, and dress like they play for a grunge band.  The disjointed Occupy Wall Street movement lasted, what - five minutes - and disappeared in time for the election. Caldeon's demand of emotional acrobatics and effects like cold, rapid-fire delivery, and mock over-dramatization would have been useful foils in actors and for a public who are already charged with political emotion.  But here, where most people come to escape fighting for their ideals so that they can earn a living, and where artists mostly romanticize being political, what you end up seeing is the strain of these artists to be filled with meaning. Calderon would have needed to alter this production for our political and social context but was evidently not able to.  As a result, I could see what he wrote, but don't think this production gave us his play at all. 

Theatre - Opus No. 7

Saw this last weekend - wonderful improvisatory and lively piece of theatre.

Opus No. 7

Dmitry Krymov Lab - Moscow School of Dramatic Art

St. Ann's Warehouse

Rediscovering art in suffering, rediscovering language in silence (Books - The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine)

Barely a few pages into Andrei Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man (Trans. Geoffrey Strachan, Graywolf Press, 2012), I had a feeling it was going to become a favorite novel of 2012.  It is a literate paean to the life of a simple man, made memorable by his fierce and determined love.  It begins in Paris as Shutov, an emigre Russian writer, mourns a break-up with a much younger woman.  He mouths appreciation for Chekhov that is learned, indeed he speaks on television as a member of literary panel of experts, yet in his appraisal he is distant, formulaic, and, as one ambitious for a different kind of success, he is soured by fear of his own mediocrity. He is a man caught in between - in between old age and youth, in between success and ordinariness, in between the refined, educated life of a Frenchman-of-letters and a victim of the Soviet repression of anything humanistic or beautiful.

I'm not Russian, Lea.  I'm Soviet.  So you see I'm filthy, stupid, and vicious.  Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about.

Voluptuary and statesman (Books - Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie)

Literature, theatre, and neuroscience are the fascinations I profess in the tagline to this blog, but while my enthusiasm for fiction and science are evident in my reading choices, and my interest in how narratives build selves shows up again and again in my writing, I think of my interest in Central and Eastern European history as a kind of secret pleasure - one I share with my dear friend Sheila (although I haven't read nearly the amount she has on the subject).  We met for an evening of red wine and talk this past week and she saw Robert Massie's Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (625 pages. Random House, 2011 ) poking its massive head out of my briefcase and laughed knowingly.  Many a time is it that we have met over the last twenty years when the second to arrive finds the first at the bar, red wine already in-progress, nose buried in a 900 page tome about the purges of Stalin, or the velvet revolution.  In any event, the truth now out on the table, I can confess to not merely enjoying Massie's biography of Catherine II, and learning a ton about 18th century European history - not just of Russia but also Poland and Austria-Hungary, and he does a great one-chapter mini-review of the French Revolution - but also to having done some much-needed work on my biceps, triceps, and lats, lugging the 4 lbs of its heft back and forth to work every day.

What use is history? (Books - In Europe by Geert Mak)

There is no use fixating on past mistakes, some advise. Stay in the present, say the gurus. But these approaches are anathema to the human nervous system. Even basic nervous systems use sensory equipment - eyes, ears, antennae, pressure sensors - connected to a few dozen nerves to adequately serves an organism which wishes to avoid danger, find food, or reproduce. But one advantage of having a brain is that we can accumulate information about common patterns of stimuli existing in our environment, using it to anticipate what we encounter in the future. Our brain's visual system makes

Seeking freedom on multiple levels (Books - The Free World by David Bezmozgis)

The Free World, David Bezmozgis's novel about the immigration of a Jewish family from Soviet-governed Latvia to the West in the 1970s, has made a few of this year's top ten lists. Although I found much in it to interest me, it isn't quite making mine. The Krasnansky family consists of Alec, his brother Karl, their parents, wives, and Karl's children. They come to Rome - which serves as the purgatory between their old lives (Soviet, Jewish, a world where they have possessed some power, some property, and some sense of themselves) and their new (Italian, Catholic, a world of poverty and uncertainty). Here they wait to find out which country will grant them a visa - their hope of salvation. This novel is about the aspiration to be free in both a political sense and a personal one. Even as Alec and the other characters aspire to escape Soviet economic oppression and anti-Semitism, they find they cannot be free of themselves. The abstract realm of this paradox is created smartly and on multiple levels however the tension that sustains a drama, the kind one can feel, remained a distant idea.

A history of volatile Central Europe where the political is the personal (Books - The Ghosts of Europe by Anna Porter)

Anna Porter's The Ghosts of Europe relates the history of a rapidly changing region - Central Europe - that is Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. She focuses on the twenty years since the 1989 revolution which concluded in the fall of the Soviet empire, but necessarily informs this discussion with a good deal of context, including how these countries and their people were impacted by World War II, as this was so much the making of the region, and sometimes reaching back further to include the influences of the Ottoman or Hapsburg Empires. Though informative, her approach makes no pretense at a broad or objective text bookish approach. Her question is focused and it motivation is personal.

In 2006, I set out to discover whether democracy had taken root behind the Iron Curtain. I chose Central Europe because this part of the world had been the dividing space between East and West, or, as Stalin and Churchill deemed, between spheres of conflicting influence. My second reason is that I am a Central European.

Memories of making art in Stalinist Russia (Books - Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay)

When the Ragazzo and I were up in Kent,Connecticut to get married, we came across a little bookstore (fancy that). The woman behind the counter recommended Daphne Kalotay's new novel Russian Winter. I'm a sucker for personal recommendations in indy bookstores if they seem honest and, I must admit, I probably would not have read this heartfelt debut novel otherwise.

Russian Winter is set alternately in post-World War II Russia and contemporary Boston and is structured around the auction of the jewelry of a now-retired prima ballerina of Russia's Bolshoi ballet, Nina Revskaya. A description of the featured jewels and their price, as might appear in an auction catalog, head each chapter. Of particular interest is a set of amber jewels. Although Nina offers what she believes is a complete set, an anonymous donor donates a last piece, not so much because he wishes to be generous but because he knows that the origin of these jewels holds the secret of his parentage, of which he is ignorant. Unfortunately, this story is so painful Nina, that she refuses to meet him. The plot of Russian Winter is the uncovering of this secret, and in doing so offers an historical novel of Stalin's Russia, a touching story about family origins and love, and a mystery whose solution I thought I had, but the complete details were a surprise to me.

This is a lot to take on in a debut novel and occasionally the seams show. The details around dance rehearsals and performance sometime read like a well researched list of technical terms, I couldn't smell that mixture of rosin, old sprung wood floors, and sweat. I felt that Kalotay lived inside the details of what it was like to be an artist in Stalinist USSR much more completely. The lack of privacy in shared living quarters, the summer dacha and banya, what people ate, what they wore, what it was like to tour. One of the novel's most vivid sections is when three dancers on tour in East Berlin looking for makeup and tights in accidentally cross to the West.

They emerge from the subway to a bustling street, oddly bright though the sky is as gray and cold as before. Shop windows glow with neon signs, and above them, big and clean, are billboards such as Nina has never seen, colorful and spotlit even though it is daytime. People everywhere; even their coats and hats look brighter, somehow. "That's why everyone had to get off." Nina says it even though it is clear from Polina's and Vera's faces that they too understand.

"We're not supposed to be here," Polina says.

"We didn't know," Vera whispers, eyes wide as she takes in the scene before them, the people walking at an easy clip, unworried, and the buildings that, while still somewhat derelict, are cleaner and free of rubble, with lights illuminating their windows...

In front of them is a vegetable kiosk. And there, heaped at the end, like something out of a fairy tale, is a stack of bright yellow bananas.

Polina and Vera too stare, as Nina allows herself to fully take in the scene around her...

I love the sense Kalotay went after of Dorothy emerging into colorful Oz following the drab sepia of Kansas, but the bananas are her "money shot." Unfortunately, Kalotay sometimes relies on explaining a little more than she needs to. I wish she had had a few more bananas.

Another strength of this novel is its marvelously detailed secondary characters. Nina's mother-in-law, a member of the defunct aristocracy, embittered by her decline in status, with whom Nina must live once she is married. Fellow dancer, Polina, whose conflict about being a good friend or a good citizen by informing on her colleagues so torments her that she breaks on in a horrible skin rash. These characters really inhabited flesh.

The sub-plot of Gershstein (Gersh), a soviet composer, who is hounded and eventually imprisoned because of Stalin's paranoid anti-Semitism, and his wife, Zoya whose desperate optimism keeps her trying to be the model party member throughout his imprisonment, was particularly engrossing. It integrates factual historical research, with a sense of living in a summer dacha, and all the while Gersh and Viktor, Nina's husband and a successful poet, debate for whom the artists works in Stalinist Russia.

"You sound like Zoya!" Gersh says, as Viktor surely expects him to. He can mention her today, because Vera has gone off one one of her long walks, gathering mushrooms. By the gate, her hand resting on the iron fence, Nina moves through her daily barre exercises. She hasn't skipped a day of training. Even a week of missed practice could mean bruised toes and aching limbs when her muscles are forced to work again.

"This utilitarian view of art makes my insides squirm," Gersh says. "You know that, of course."

"Why do you put up with her, anyway?" Nina calls.

"Who?"

"Zoya!"

"She makes me look good, don't you think?" Gersh says in his teasing voice. In a lisping imitation, he adds, "Upright citizen. Party spirit and all that. Perfectly commendable, actually."

Nina doesn't laugh; even in his mocking, Gersh seems uncomfortable. Perhaps Zoya really does feel to him like some kind of badge of approval. There has been more anti-Semetic commentary: editorials in the press, even another swipe at Gersh himself by one particularly belligerent critic whom Viktor has nicknamed "the Rottweiler." More than once Nina has glimpsed the slogan "Down with the Cosmopolites!" Maybe Gersh really does see Zoya as a protector of sorts.

"I'm not joking," Viktor says. "I mean what I said. About reaching the people. There's a reason front-row seats cost only three rubles at your theater, Nina. Life is hard, people are tired. You bring them beauty. You make them proud. You remind us of all we're capable of - that we ourselves are a work in progress, creating a great new society. Why do you think our Iosef Vissarionovich himself prefers the biggest, most colorful productions? He knows it's the monumental stuff - the most colorful scenery, the brightest costumes - that has the strongest impact."

"Exactly," Gersh says, "this is exactly the problem! There's no room for complexity, for sensitivity, for anything the slightest bit challenging. Instead we're supposed to pander to the audience. When, really, how are they every going to learn to appreciate anything truly profound? Everything always has to be exaggerated. And you know why: because people need to be cued. They need to be told what they're supposed to think.

What Kalotay does beautifully here in terms of setting is capture that breadth of life that Chekhov's plays or Mikhailkov's films capture - everyone is going about their lives and simultaneously talking. However, although the subject of the debate is perfect, it does not seem a part of the character's larger lives. It reads to me like an explanation for the reader of a key argument of the time which Kalotay researched. A composer and a poet who live and work in the mileu of other artists would talk about their own or other's specific works, an artistic problem they are solving, what someone did or did not do in the rehearsal, such and such a painting, they would be unlikely to have a discussion about "pandering to the audience" and "reaching the people" in this general and illustrative way. This aspect of Russian Winter was not entirely satisfying for me.

Luckily Kalotay is passionate about her subject matter, her interest clearly comes from some personal place. I was fascinated by the setting, and after any quibbles I might have about living in the details, the plotting was excellent and kept me reading with genuine interest. Kalotay also writes two poems in the voice of Viktor that I found lovely and convincing. Russian Winter's multiple layers of memory create a wholeness that enveloped me.

A fruitful collaboration

If you have enjoyed any of the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translations of the great Russian novels as I have (I have yet to read their War and Peace but I really liked the Anna Karenina and the Crime and Punishment) then you might enjoy this interview with them from the Wall Street Journal. They're working on Dr. Zhivago now. That might be worth a re-read when it's published. I really enjoyed it the first time around.

Hat tip: Mark Sarvas

Does the destruction of libraries herald the death of a society?

Is this not a tragedy? The ruins of an abandoned Russian library, the full series of pictures is here at English Russia.

Hat tip: Hang Fire Books

Extraordinary writing on distant and unknown places (Books - Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski)

It's wonderful being on vacation, but it amazing, even on a supposed break, how much there is to do - taking care of finances, doctor appointments, giving away clothes, selling books, cleaning closets, PhD application, getting through those old Book Reviews - so I'm not getting in quite as many books as I had hoped. That said, I have read about 1/3 of Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium. This is the first book of the Russian Challenge I have chosen to read. Kapuscinski was a Polish journalist with wide-ranging interests and a most unique voice. This is the first of his books I have read - part memoir, part travelogue, part political critique - the subject matter ranges from the production of cognac to Armenian sculpture. The book begins with his own childhood memories of the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939. Actually, no, this book begins with a page and a half of quotes by Chekhov, Vasily Grossman, Simone Weil, H. G. Wells, Dostoyesvky and others each characterizing Russia (differently). He recalls, for instance, the changes in his school curriculum and the requirement to learn the Russian alphabet which, in Stalin's day, began with 's' rather than 'a.'

Petrus, who is a Belorussian, can read the whole title: "Stalin, Voprosy Leninizma" (Studies in Leninism). It is the only book from which we learn Russian, and our only copy of this book. On the stiff cover wrapped in gray linen, large, gold letters.

"Departing from us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to...," the humble and quite Wladzio reads from the first row in a faltering voice. Best not to ask who Lenin was. All our mothers have already instructed us not to ask about anything. But these warnings weren't necessary anyway. I cannot explain it, I cannot say where it came from, but there was something so frightening in the air, something so tense and heavy, that the town in which we use to cavort with wild and joyful abandon had suddenly become a minefield. We were afraid even to take a deep breath, lest we set off an explosion.

I am so fascinated by Russian culture, the Russian language, the country's great history - it's the reason I was so excited to participate in this challenge - however, we shouldn't forget how most ordinary Russian souls lived, the oppressiveness of the czars as well as the horrors of the great failed experiment that was the Russian revolution and the nightmares of the Stalinist regime that followed. Along with their vast land, their impressive works of art, and their soulful culture there was much suffering, poverty, and oppression and that makes me glad to be starting with Kapuscinski's book.

Next he remembers a 1958 journey on the Trans-Siberian railroad - an astonishing, claustrophobic train trip through a landscape made barren by Siberian snow and intense paranoia.

While still at university I read Bierdayev's old book in which he reflected upon how the great expanses of the Imperium had influenced the Russian soul. What does a Russian think about, somewhere on the shore of the Yenisey, or deep in the Amur taiga? Every road that he takes seems to have no end. He can walk along it for days and months, and always Russia will surround him. The plains have no end, nor the forests, nor the rivers. To rule over such boundless expanses, says Bierdayev, one had to create a boundless state. And behold, the Russian fell into a contradiction - to maintain the great expanses, the Russian must maintain a great state; on the maintenance of this great state he expends his energy, of which not enough remains for anything else - for organization, for husbandry, and so on. He expends his energy on a state that then enthralls and oppresses him.

Bierdayev believes that this immensity, this limitlessness of Russia, has a negative influence on its inhabitants' way of thinking. For it does not demand of them concentration, tension, an intensification of energy, or the creation of a dynamic, vigorous culture. Everything falls apart, is diluted, drowned in this ungraspable formlessness. Russian - an expanse, on the one hand, endless, broad, and yet, on the other hand, so crushing that it takes one's breath away, and there is nothing left to breathe.

This third section remembers a 1967 journey through the southern republics of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkemenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Uzbekistan. This fascinating region of the world contains treasures of civilizations that we hardly learn anything about in the West, and yet it in many ways it gave birth to our modern civilization. Christianity became the state religion before it was accepted elsewhere, tribal relationships influence politics to this day, Azerbaijan is rich in oil. Kapuscinski writes of gorgeous frescoes in a Georgian church from the year 1010 that were ordered painted over by the czar. He offers a treatise on the production of cognac in Georgia, an amazing history of Armenia and its desire to save the world by translating great books of all cultures into its own language. And there is a description of his climb up a high tower made of wood in pitch darkness to see the Caspian Sea, the city of Baku, and its oil wells:

The tower stands in the middle of the sea, the sea is black, although it is called Caspian, and I am climbing up to heaven on stairs that creak because they are made of wood, the whole tower is made of wood nailed together, it reaches to the stars, and although the wind rocks it like a stalk, it stands, gniotsa nie lamiotsa (it will bend but it won't break), so on this tower I am climbing up to heaven, it is dark here, actually it is black like the sea, we are walking into tar, I prefer not to look anymore, I would like to stop, enough is enough, but I can hear Nik-Nik going farther, so I go too, into the darkness, into the abyss, into the chasm. Everything is becoming unreal, because I can no longer see anything, meaning that I can see only this thing of wood around me, rough, unplanned, as if hairy, a piece of raw wood wedged into the sky, in an utterly gratuitous place, jutting out in the darkness, improbably, abstract.

I found the writing in this passage so palpable that at the end of reading it my feet and palms were sweating.

More soon.

A still life by Russian photographer Galina Lukianova. The kind of day that makes me want to read. Wood s lot has another with a link to more of her work.

A literature as vast as its land

Ex Libris has proposed a Russian lit challenge in '08 and I'm going to be there. I know the challenge could use a talented button maker (not the Peer Gynt kind) if anyone with those talents wants to volunteer. If you're the type that know you will never read any Tolstoi without a push or if you're a nut about Russian culture and history like I am - head on over and join the challenge.

I am proposing:

Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman
The Gulag Archipelago - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Natasha's Fire - Orlando Figges
Heavy Sand - Anatoly Rybakov
Among the Russians - Coin Thubron
Revolution on My Mind - Jochen Hellbeck
and possibly Re-reading Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) and Anna Karenina (Lev Tolstoy)


Oh my gosh, I have no Chekhov, I'll have to add something.

Collusion with Terror - a repression or a perfection of self? (Books - Children of the Arbat, Tear off the Masks, Revolution on My Mind)

I've finished Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat - a novel about life in Russian during the reign of Stalin. It is a multi-faceted sweep across the vast Russian society during the mid-1930s as the purges were beginning and leading up to the assassination of Kirov. It looks at party loyalists, Stalinists, individualists, pragmatists, exiles, and the mind of Stalin himself. I've done several posts on it, here they are. It is an epic work with a broad view, but easy to read.

As I was finishing it, I noticed an article by Aileen Kelly in an old issue of The New York Review of Books that I hadn't read yet called Why They Believed in Stalin. It's a review of two recent books - Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin by Jochen Hellbeck, which have different but not completely mutually exclusive views of how individual citizens lived with the violence committed in the name of Soviet revolution. Fitzpatrick's book looks at the strategy of obliterating a sense of individual self altogether:

Alexander Zinoviev depicted a new type of human being: Homo sovieticus, a "fairly disgusting creature" who was the end product of the Soviet regime's efforts to transform the population into emodiments of the values of communism.

Hellbeck looks at four diarists, whose journal reveal their strategies. These range from a slow evolution from a member of the old intelligentsia to eventual justification of violence in the service of the creation of "new forms of life," to an all-out campaign of perfecting the self as an instrument of revolution. Kelly quotes Hellbeck's final chapter:

Bolshevik activists were successful in propagating the urgency of individual growth through adherence to the revolution because such thinking was rooted in Russia's historical past. The moral duties of self-improvement, social activism, and self-expression in concert with history were a staple of Russian intellectual and political life for almost a century before the revolution of 1917. As Stalin-era diarists worked to align themselves with history and to achieve a historically grounded notion of selfhood, they acted in striking consistency with generations of educated Russians since the early nineteenth century. To behave in such ways was what distinguished a member of the Russian intelligentsia.

These both sound like fascinating books, I'm particularly drawn to the second one as diaries play into my interests in character, identity, psychology, acting, and the like. Next up for me, another novel on Russia, this one set just before the revolution and written by the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. The Beginning of Spring was recommended by novelist David Leavitt in one of his guest posts at The Elegant Variation.

Hearts and Minds (Mikhalkov's Anna and Children of the Arbat)

For all I read of the history and psychology behind the growth of Stalin's Russia in Children of the Arbat, that state was created one soul at a time.

At first, Nina used to say that Sasha's arrest had been an absurd accident, but then new nuances began to creep into her conversation: there was the difficult internal and international situation, the sharpening of the class struggle, the activities of anti-Party groupings, and as never before particular precision and clarity of one's position was required, whereas unfortunately Sasha sometimes put his own understanding of events above the point of view of the collective. In a word, she hinted that Sasha's arrest had some foundation.

The change has to happen in the minds and hearts of the people who make up the State. This reminded me of one of the most amazing films I've ever seen, Anna, by Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov. Mikhalkov is a great Russian actor and director - his film Burnt by the Sun, was an international success and deservedly so - a gorgeous film. But Anna is really something extraordinary, it documents his daughter Anna's life from ages 6 to 18 alongside Russian history in the same years (late 70s - through early 90s). In it he asks her the same few questions each year, basic questions: "What do you love?" "What do you fear?" And through that we watch the world change. What is more amazing still about this film is that when Mikhalkov began making it, the Soviet government controlled the use of all film, keeping strict record, day after day, of the number of meters of used so that no unauthorized film could be shot. Mikhalkov and his collaborator Sergei Miroshnichenko had surreptitiously collected film bits over the years and used these little saved up scraps to shoot the film. He only worked with one other person on the film so as not to endanger anyone in the making of the film.

Other posts on Children of the Arbat 1, 2, 3.

Secrecy and Power - Who will resist and who will serve? (Books - Children of the Arbat III)

While I couldn't find any images of original editions of Children of the Arbat, this is the original samizdat (see a definition here) of Czech writer Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga. Havel wrote, largely for the theater, as well as leading a campaign to save a subversive literary magazine Tvar. In 1965 the StB tried to recruit Havel as an informant but his refusal led to his continual observation throughout the communist regime. In 1979 he was arrested for anti-state activities and imprisoned for months without a trial. He was imprisoned four times but remained no less subversive a voice. After the devision of Czechoslovakia, he became the first president of the Czech Republic. I give this very short summary of his political life to ask - what makes one person subversive and the other submissive?

One of the plot lines that I'm enjoying right now in Children of the Arbat is about Yuri Sharok, the son of factory workers, whose aim is to become a lawyer for the factory where he worked as a young man. He is among a group of students in school whose popular leader, Sasha, is expelled for anti-state activities and sentenced to three years in Siberia. He had been a rival to the popular Sasha. Following school, he is approached by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police who were the force behind the political repression, running the Gulags, as well as conducting espionage in other countries, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Why had they picked him? He was an average student, he never got the best grades. And his social work was average, he only did what he was told. Average people had their uses, too, evidently...

Sharok had been created for this job, he was right for it, not open-hearted Maxim Kostin, or that spineless intellectual Vadim Marasevich, or that overconfident Sasah Pankratov. Nobody would be able to wriggle out from Sharok's grasp, or manage to justify tghemselves. He would not believe in anyone's sincerity - it was impossible to believe sincerely in this whole business, and anyone who claimed they did was lying...

He's be safe there, nobody would be able to touch him. He'd by one of those who could reach everyone else.

In this part of Rybakov's story, we observe the evolution of his choice - the birth of cruelty. Another one of those instances where it is easy to say "I would never...," but would we? I would like to think I would not. But would I lie in jail like Havel? Endanger my friends and family? My livelihood? My life?

Playing Stalin - Giving history a face (Books - Children of the Arbat)

As I continue to read Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, it strikes me the ways in which the book gives a face to the Soviet Union under Stalin. It tries to get at the character of Stalin, but not just by looking at famous moments in history. Rybakov looks at the little details. As Budyagin anticipates a meeting with Stalin he has tried to get for over a year, Rybakov characterizes the difficulty of dealing with Stalin, the man like this:

In exile, Stalin had once refused to talk to a comrade who'd teased him for sleeping in his socks. Small of stature and puny, he had appeared especially vulnerable in Siberia. He was always cold, so he slept in his socks. Stalin owned a multicolored, quilted silk blanket, and that, too, became the butt of jokes, which Stalin took as proof of his own inability to adapt and as a sign of weakness. Eventually they stopped laughing at him. The realized it was impossible to quarrel with Stalin, as he was incapable of reconciliation.

It's one thing to know that the man had a mustache, or how he assumed the leadership of the party from Lenin, or that in 1934 he believed it was France, England and Japan that Russia needed to fear, not Germany. It's another to know that Stalin's inflexibility extended from the contrary opinion of a once valued advisor about the threat Germany could pose to Russia, to the insecurity he felt about having to wear socks to bed. Or that, on a shopping excursion to replace a lost scarf, Stalin takes a long time because he didn't want a wool that would scratch his neck. He buys the softest and most expensive scarf. Rybakov is collecting for us the kind of details you would want if you were to act the role of Stalin in a play.

The whole portrait of the time is rife with these kind of everyday details. Another important storyline is that of a Komsomol or a student cell of the Communist Party, one of them. Sasha, is first expelled from school and then imprisoned following the publication of a newspaper deemed disloyal. His mother slowly learns from friends and neighbors what kind of foods should be in the packages she sends to her son in prison, or how to interpret the phone call she will receive from the prison officials as to understand whether he will perform forced labor in the North or the South of the country and therefore whether he needs boots and a heavy coat.

A simple detail I particularly enjoyed was that one evening some of Sasha's recently graduated colleagues from school get tickets for a production at the Vakhtangov theater - a tidbitthat was exciting for me to read because I studied everything I could find on this short lived genius of Russian theater - once a pupil of Stanislavsky - from pieces of his production books, to moment-by-moment descriptions of his rehearsal processes. Here is a picture of his legendary production of Turandot.

Secret writings on Stalin's reign of terror (Books - Children of the Arbat - Anatoli Rybakov)

Above, as the street sign tells you, is Arbat Street in Moscow, photographed about 10 years ago. I wasn't in the mood and yet somehow I've been sucked into Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov, an epic novel highly critical of the Stalinist Russia. Written in the 1960s, it was suppressed by the Soviet government and could be read only in samizdat - secretly produced copies of works that had been censored by the state. Bulgakov's amazing The Master and Margarita was also first available only by samizdat, which translates as 'self-published. ' Although some of these editions were printed, many were produced on typewriters with carbon paper and the limited copies passed from hand-to-hand by enthusiastic readers. What must it have been like to read a work like this in samizdat?! For those of us who love books, the passion that would drive one to literally risk one's life to read and write, can sound almost romantic, but I can't believe there was anything romantic about living under it. I've heard many people who say that "better" art was created under these repressive regimes. For an interesting book about the effect of glasnost on the visual art world in Russia check out Andrew Solomon's The Irony Tower.

Anway, Children of the Arbat was finally published in 1987 and in the U.S. in 1988. I am about 200 pages into the book. There is nothing particularly clever in the writing, unless Harold Shukman's translation does not serve it well. This is a book driven solely by the force of a great story. It is set in soviet Russia in the 1930s and looks at life in the 15 year old utopia across a broad swathe of society - party official and rebel, bureaucrat, student, and factory worker, child and adult, those of a peasant background and those from money. Stalin himself is a character. While the revolution of 1917 overthrew czarist rule, as soon as Stalin defeated Trotsky, he created a plan to make a backward Russia competitive with the world's other ruling powers. To accomplish he instituted a totalitarian government, installing himself as its leader. Along with that came programs to industrialize,create collective farms, and a draconian campaign to repress anyone whom his party officials determined to hold ideas politically contrary to this plan or, more exactly, to Stalin. This resulted in imprisonment and forced labor in the gulags and, ultimately, the death of millions of people. Articles on Stalinist Russia here and Stalin himself here, if you're interested.

What I'm finding impressive about this quickly paced book is that, while I'm learning history, I'm experiencing it through its impact on individual lives. Rybakov brings very much to life the excitement driving the dream of creating an ideal society on the one hand with the terrible costs that resulted when paranoia and a dehumanizing hysteria drove those with power to try to force millions of others to act and think as they wished them to.

Rybakov has been compared to Pasternak and Michner (accurately, I think). He also reminds me of Uris. Rybakov has also written Heavy Sand, about a Jewish family's life in the Soviet ghetto and their participation in the Warsaw uprising, which I've never even heard of. Alibris has several copies for a couple of dollars. One of them is going to be mine.

More on Children of the Arbat as I continue reading.