The Island of Crimea/The Compromise
Aksyonov, Vassily & Dovlatov, Sergei
portunity to evaluate Lyndon Johnson first hand through the relatively unfiltered medium of television. What they saw damaged their President mor~ than what was written or said...
...And the leathery, furrowed neck, the red patches on the skin below the ears, the chin Victoria Sackett is associate editor of Public Opinion...
...The situations and dialogue of many of these storiesbring to mind the early Waugh...
...The Compromise is less a novel than a collection of short stories, all clearly based on Dovlatov's experience as a Soviet journalist...
...Without it one is stifled, forced to make impossible choices-between a foolhardy honesty, which gets you into trouble, or toeing the official line, which leads to selfcontempt...
...The humor in these novels is not Wodehousean, but dark, very dark...
...Liberated...
...Name Street Address City State ZipCode II Or bill my MasterCard or VISA (circle one...
...They've given men every reason to run away, to cheat, to hate, to change...
...What will happen to these ~migr~ writers--out of touch with their own country and, as many of them admit, not quite in touch with their ~dopted country...
...The statement is in a sense absurd...
...Her accomplishments thrust her into public view--as did some of her private a c t i v i t i e s - - b u t she was relentlessly unpolitical...
...Every one of the stories begins with an epigraph consisting of an official item from the Soviet press...
...The most recent fantastic realist to land in the West is the Russian writer, Georgi Vladimov, the author of Faithful Ruslan, a grotesque fable, brilliantly rendered, that looks at life in the Gulag from the point of view of a Soviet guard dog...
...On its unnaturalness, she evokes a parental dispute remembered from childhood in which her mother had stormed at Captain Colette, " I forbid you to speak to me that way: you're not even related to C o l e t t e was a scandal...
...The objects of love are rarely what they seem to be, so that marriage becomes an unnatural state, preserved only by deceit...
...Such an art would correspond to the spirit of our time...
...It may be somewhat misleading to label all these writers fantastic realists...
...The Island of Crimea, a novel by the recent Russtun emlgre, Vassily Aksyonov, is very much a work of fantastic realism, but it differs from the others in one regard: It is as much about the democratic capitalist West as about the totalitarian Communist East...
...And I know only too well to whom I should be thankful, because the sole aim of my emigration was freedom...
...Right now," he said, " I put my hope in a phantasmagoric art, with hypotheses instead of a Purpose, an art in which the grotesque will replace realistic descriptions of ordinary life...
...Sinyavsky and Kundera are in the West...
...band's self-aggrandizing theft, wrote resignedly, and developed the habits and the talent that later brought her a reputation of her own...
...Describing the confusions of life in the West and the frustrations of life in the East, Aksyonov is often very funny, yet he clearly worries about the ability of the West to withstand Soviet expansionism...
...He has gotten as far as he can go on the engine of self-interest...
...A central irony informs the book: In the West Luchnikov and his affluent friends are bored with material possessions and preoccupied with ideas...
...It has all the elements of best-selling international thrillers: sex, heavy drinking, violence, suspense...
...Indecency, libertinism, exhibitionism-these are the most illusory of all, the public faces worn by a more provincial private domesticity...
...Luchnikov is not a credible character...
...Dean Acheson's comment encompassed a huge mound of neuroses and personality difficulties that were responsible as much as anything else for the failure o f the Johnson presidency--in areas of substantive policy as well as in media imagery...
...Colette became a writer against her will, locked in a room for four hours a day by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-ViUars ( " W i l l y " ) , who forced her to record her Burgundian i childhood...
...She never thought herself enslaved, even though at one point in her life she actually was...
...General Wrangel, the head of the White army during the 1918-1921 Civil War, tried to create an independent anti-Bolshevik state in the Crimea, but he was defeated by Bolshevik forces and the Crimea again incorporated into the Soviet Union...
...These are not comedies of manners but what we might call works of "fantastic r e a l i s m " - - a phrase coined by Sinyavsky...
...Colette writes most convincingly-with an unsettling omniscience--of love in marriage...
...But the strategy could not override a growing perception that the President of the Republic and the titular leader of the free world was a peculiarly repellent individual...
...She would not have understood the tense, self-conscious, sometimes badtempered seeking after freedom that the status connotes today...
...And so he founds a movement called "The Idea of a Common Fate," whose goal is to reunite all Russians by having the island of Crimea merge with the Soviet Union...
...This is the woman who performed without her clothes on, long before Broadway made that gesture a political statement...
...2 Account Number Expires THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 41 were not a peninsula but an island--a democratic capitalist island, a kind of Hong Kong on the flanks of the Soviet Union...
...The other characters are no more convincing...
...Colette...
...Only one character does, and he turns out to be a Soviet official--the Central Committee's expert on Crimea...
...All the same, he has pro4buced a work that no one with a serious interest in this critical administration can afford to ignore...
...Some of these writers, particularly the South Americans, are preoccupied with what the United States hath wrought in the world, either directly or indirectly...
...Though Aksyonov has some scathing things to say about the Soviet Union, his main concern is the dark side of the West--not that the West is oppressive, but that it is spinning out of control, bent on a selfdestructive course...
...As Dovlatov himself said at a recent conference of em~gre writers: "I still have many problems, individual and professional, yet for the first time in my life, I am happy...
...And through all of them runs the unruffled voice of their author's calm prose...
...Unlike so many who have tried so hard to achieve liberated status, Colette qualifies simply because she barely tried at all...
...She could write brutally about the effects of aging on women ( " I saw you just as Alexis Trallard had seen you...
...a modish friend's determined efforts to be fashionable make her look like " a little maid...
...He managed to win the love of Jack Valenti and a few other loyalists...
...Whether in pursuit of pleasure or of crazy ideas, Aksyonov's affluent Crimeans don't appreciate their freedom...
...Aksyonov's novel is in some respects conventional...
...Books may be returned within | , 10 days of receipt for a full refund...
...Colette was a woman who did what she wanted, and got away with it...
...That it's some kind of idiotic play and we're just spectators...
...The Island of Crimea is based on the following premise: What if Crimea Money-back guarantee 02-069 Harvard University Press | 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 ~ Please rush me copy(ies)ofTheSupply-SideRevolutionby ri Paul Craig Roberts at $18.50 each...
...Since fantastic realism doesn't gladden the hearts of cultural commissars, most Russian and East European writers who work in this vein have been expelled from their native lands--a better fate than that of their literary forebears who disappeared or were hauled off to the Gulag...
...be more exalted than to sacrifice himself on the altar of this Cause, since he knows full well that merger with the Soviet Union will mean the loss of all his wealth and influence...
...As Dovlatov's hero remarks: "Don't yop have the feeling that all this is happening to someone else...
...left to its own devices and long past h o p e...
...In calling for an art rooted in fantasy, Stephen Miller is executive assistant to the Board of Radio Free Europe and author of Special Interest Groups in American Politics (Transaction Books...
...No matter how hard he tried, he seemed unable to get to the bottom of it...
...Writing under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz, Sinyavsky in a 1959 essay described the kind of fiction he hoped for...
...Like Sinyavsky and Aksyonov, Dovlatov is continually amazed by the absurdity of Soviet life...
...Robert Phelps's fine collection of one hundred Colette stories is replete with these themes...
...Colette's experience under Willy's lock and key opened her eyes to the flimsiness of first observations--a preoccupation in her writing...
...The notion that reality surpasses one's parodic fantasies is an article of faith not only among East European fantastic realists, but among fantastic realists the world over...
...But beyond the titillating plot, one finds a novel of ideas--a dark, intellectual comedy that explores the dreariness of life in the Soviet Union and, above all, the weaknesses of the West, as symbolized by the fantasy state of Crimea...
...now he wants blindly, willfully to pursue the path of disinterest...
...Colette silently endured her husTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 43...
...they are forced to lie all the time...
...Others, especially well-known North Americans such as Barthelme, Heller, and Pynchon, imply that all modern life is mad, that all advanced industrial societies are nightmarish places ruled by power-hungry technocrats...
...As Luchnikov says of a character in The Island of Crimea: "Every time Soviet reality surpassed his parodic fantasies he felt a bit inadequate...
...A successful newspaper magnate, he has everything money and influence can buy, yet he yearns for something more--a cause...
...Lyndon Johnson sought to fulfill his need for affection by distributing gifts to those in his personal orbit, entitlements to the American people, and TVAs on the Mekong to the Vietnamese...
...Women have no excuses," she said in one story...
...President, you are not a very likeable man...
...she might have asked...
...The first is about the main character's difficulties in finding a suitable newborn baby to celebrate as the 400,000th citizen of Tallinn, the second abotit how he is required to participate in--not merely report on-the burial ceremony of a Party official...
...In the East most people have no time for ideas...
...no doubt he received the gratitude of some of the poor to whom he had given money or new opportunities...
...Having found liberation in captivity, she had to admit that no condition, and no person, is what it appears, at least not for long...
...So is Jiri Grusa, the Czech author who wrote The Questionnaire, a work of fantastic realism about a young man's coming of age and a Czech town's difficulties with the savage god of modern history, who brought first the Nazis and then the Communists...
...Is Aksyonov implying that only those who have not known freedom--or have lost freedom--truly know its value...
...Liberated...
...Acheson's response was characteristically blunt: "Mr...
...Sergei Dovlatov's comic novel, The Compromise, is less ambitious and less fantastic than Aksyonov's, although definitely grotesque...
...From what...
...Luchnikov is not in love with Communism...
...For years she submitted to the philandering whims of two husbands-going so far as to distract one husband's mistress while he entertained himself with another...
...She married too often, and for six or so years after her first marriage ended spent her time rather conspicuously in the company of Paris's most aristocratic lesbians...
...She did not reveal WiUy's unsavory part in her literary beginnings until five years after his death (although she did manage to claim authorship before then...
...What could Designed to introduce collegiate materials to high school students and recent high school graduates, the Summer Program is a concentrated two-week study o f the great questions o f the age in the light o f the Western and American traditions: the nature o f true freedom, the purpose o f our political society, the nature o f heroic action, the life o f a Christian in a troubled, secular age...
...I have enclosed my check in the amount of i :, , plus $1.50 postage and handling...
...As Sinyavsky said at the same conference: "Probably many of us-I have in mind recent emigrants--have a perceptual experience of the West that is very diverse, vivid, even exceptional in its acuteness, while at the same time it is quite confused, impressionistic, and not quite thought o u t . " Perhaps many will continue Aksyonov's experiment in The Island of Crimea, turning their acute if confused impressions to good account by writing works of fantastic realism that describe the way we live now in the West...
...they are preoccupied with getting their hands on Western products...
...He is in love with the idea of community...
...In all their writing and stories, one thing is clear: freedom matters...
...In 1980 he ran afoul of Soviet authorities for publishing a work abroad (The Burn, which will be published in English later this year), and was forced to emigrate...
...Dovlatov's title is in fact misleading, for these stories reveal that Soviet journalists never enjoy the luxury of some middle ground between truth-telling and party ideology...
...In the end, Colette was honored by her countrymen (she was "Grand Officier de la Legion d'honneur" and president of the Academie Goncourt) and paid tribute by her country (she was the first woman in France to be given a state funeral...
...a recipient of unrequited love is the unfortunate one ( " I ' m the v i c t i m . . . I envy everything he has, everything I can't have, since he's the one who's in love...
...One wishes Bornet had done more to try to explain them to us...
...The story itself is what really happened--the inside story, as it were, of the official story...
...Geographical realitiesnotwithstanding, the premise has an air of plausibility...
...She belonged to no sisterhood, to no sympathetic alliance of the afflicted...
...A child's compliant silence conceals the thoughts that take her " a d v e n t u r i n g . . . along a road of risks and temptations...
...Mature, successful, happy, she sought to change no one, and did as she chose...
...I would like to finish all my speeches in America with this wonderful word...
...The Soviet journalist cannot escape the brute fact that he is simply a hack, not a reporter of news but a parroter of the official line...
...Ever since the world began, they've been inflicting men, behind the bed curtains, with a creature inferior to the one he desired...
...Dovlatov was a journalist in Estonia who incurred the wrath of the KGB for associating with Estonian and Russian dissidents...
...After a period of severe harassment, he emigrated to the United States in 1978...
...She displayed too much of her flesh on the music hall stage and too much of her sensual soul in print...
...There is a story that Johnson, in conference with that formidable ~minence of the Democratic party, Dean Acheson, asked in frustration and self-pity, "Why d o n ' t the American people like me...
...They rob him with effrontery nowadays, when reinforced hair and rigged corsets turn any ugly, saucy little woman into a 'striking little lady.' " Despite all this, Colette was a liberated woman--or at least what a liberated woman should be...
...But they differ from Waugh's fiction in one respect...
...The weaknesses of democratic capitalism are embodied in the novel's central character, Andrei Luchnikov...
...it is as if the journalist from Scoop had gone to the Soviet Union instead of Ethiopia...
...What carries the novel is the novelist's own narrative voice--e.g., his mordant observations about the political landscape of Crimea, which is littered with groups espousing crackpot causes, or about daily existence in the Soviet Union, w~laere it is a "universally accepted fact of l i f e . . , not to notice the obvious...
...The East European fantastic realists implicitly disagree with their American counterparts...
...To be a faithful chronicler of life under Communism, one had to employ the fantastic and the grotesque...
...At one point Luchnikov makes a lengthy list of things he should bring his Soviet friends on one of his periodic trips north--including pantyhose and "a salami or two to help someone through the latest shortage...
...Biographer Yvonne Mitchell said in 1975 that Colette was "perhaps the most truly liberated woman of this century...
...My contemptuous eyes took in the slack breasts and the slipped shoulder straps of the crumpled chemise...
...Of the many disagreeable professions in the Soviet Union, his was surely one of the worst...
...We can understand his boredom, restlessness, and selfcontempt, but not that they should cause him to play the colossal fool...
...What they saw damaged their President mor~ than what was written or said about him...
...The best-known novels about totalitarianism are somber and earnest--Orwell's 1984, Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago--but there are some brilliant comic novels about Marxist-Leninist dystopias that deserve to be better known: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Sinyavsky's The Makepiece Experiment, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and--more recently--Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting...
...Sinyavsky was not only rejecting the official aesthetic dogma of the Soviet Union (socialist realism) but also suggesting that traditional realism--the realism, say, of War and Peace--was inadequate to the job at hand...
...they are more salted with bitterness than irreverence, the bitterness of someone who has to write nonsense to make a living...
...They aren't a school of writers, a literary clique, but a disparate group all of whom have departed from traditional realism for a comic blend of the fantastic and the grotesque...
...Some of these tales are slight, and most suffer from too many descriptions of people drinking, a practice many Soviet journalists no doubt find more enjoyable than a feeling of selfcontempt...
...She displeased many, but was beloved and revered by more...
...There are funny moments, however, in all the stories, two of which--"The Fifth Compromise" and "The Eighth Compromise"--are outstanding...
...It is a glorious profusion o f stories, ranging from delicious miniatures to a lengthy novelette, many of which appear in English for the first time...
...That it's not you and not me...
...This turned into the charming, successful "Claudine" series of books, to which Willy signed his own name...
...Aksyonov, the son of Eugenia Ginzburg (the author of a compelling memoir about life in the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind), was a successful Soviet novelist and screenwriter who spent some time in the West, teaching at UCLA in 1975...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
