Travel Notes in America
NEKRASOV, VIKTOR
Viktor Nekrasov's two-part account of his tour in Italy and America first appeared in the November 1962 issue of the Moscow literary journal Novy Mir. Shortly afterward, Izvestia charged the...
...But the architecture...
...In a moment the hugs and kisses will begin...
...Do you like it...
...What do I care about Berlin...
...He replied that he had not looked into this...
...Is it true that every American owns onefourth of a car...
...And the most interesting things are life and what men live by...
...Our papers tell a lot of lies about you, but I don't believe them...
...You're right...
...We were coming to the end of one of our train trips, from Buffalo to New York...
...The young American, even one who is searching and thinking, is concerned first of all with himself, with his career...
...They behaved freely, naturally and gaily, and you could sense a certain intelligence in what they asked about and what they said...
...They were anxious to talk to us, and we had no right to turn away from them and keep to ourselves...
...Unnecessary caution—let us call it that —does not bring people together, it drives them apart...
...Flying Fortress...
...Seventeen years ago you and I were fighting together, you in the air and I on the ground, and now we are marching late at night along the echoing streets of New York...
...We have a beer together...
...Near a chewing-gum machine someone is sleeping on a bench...
...He asked Tadeusz Osipowicz to step aside for a moment and gave us a little speech about discipline, about the problems and duties of a Soviet collective on foreign soil, about how so-and-so had been late for dinner on the very first day and got separated from the collective so that he had to take a taxi...
...A Kiev newspaperman, let's call him K., a member of our group who was afraid he wouldn't have anything to write about because they hadn't shown him the slums, gave a series of lectures when he got home.* There were posters all over town announcing, "America, November 1960...
...What a shame that I did not manage to meet you, that this whole story of the trip late at night, the beautiful Negro girl, the pack of Belomors, is something I invented...
...In our country, in the hospital...
...I was prepared for much that I saw: the skyscrapers, the vast numbers of cars, the lights of Broadway and the Sunday papers that weigh over two pounds...
...He looks around...
...You can't see a thing: clouds, unbroken clouds...
...Like schoolchildren we stood along the wall of the enormous building, listening to him in silence...
...When you write about these contrasts, you should keep some sort of proportion of black and white...
...I will tell only about those things I saw with my own eyes...
...This would simply be considered improper...
...K. answered: "A great deal...
...There were even a couple of them in the restaurant today.' He was actually offended that these two Negroes were not kept out of the restaurant...
...There they stand, waving their caps...
...Travel Notes in America By Viktor Nekrasov On November 2, 1960, at 9:30 p.m...
...And yet for some reason our countries are not on friendly terms...
...Is it true that the Ku Klux Klan terrorizes everyone...
...For example, it is hard to imagine one of our young men saying: "I want this because it will do me some good...
...Then we began to justify ourselves...
...And you and Jim will shout the answer, "The Americans don't want it either...
...The city that gave us May Day, after the demonstration of 1886 was fired on...
...Is such a thing possible in America...
...Then he orders another beer...
...In a way this is true, and in a way it isn't...
...How could you fail to sympathize with him...
...There are bridges, strikingly light and beautiful, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, or the George Washington in New York...
...Behind the bar, against a backdrop of many-colored bottles, stood a very pretty mulatto girl...
...It's already two a.m...
...Shortly afterward, Izvestia charged the 51-year-old novelist with "bourgeois objectivism...
...Everything lay below me...
...You prefer vodka...
...And friends...
...Gunner-radioman...
...The city where the American Communist party was born...
...The city had been covered with mist, reddish-yellow in the light from the advertising signs...
...I had a similar feeling once when I was on the peak of Mount Elbrus...
...After 10 stops, I got out, at 125th Street...
...I'll be damned.' the journalist said, 'did you see that there are Negroes staying in our hotel...
...In two days, Moscow...
...Where did you learn to drink it...
...The sun was shining and the flat waves of the lake were curling quietly over the cold, wide, deserted beach...
...Why is that...
...It is not his fault by any means...
...But our kind Ivan Ivanovich forgot one thing: the local citizens were drawn to us Soviet people...
...Someone asked about the prices of goods...
...Poltava airfield...
...The nurses brought it to you—admit it...
...A Negro in blue overalls is sweeping the platform...
...We'll wander around Kiev late at night, just as we're doing now in New York, only there'll be more of us...
...They looked us over, and then one of them said in broken Russian: "You're Russians, right...
...Personally, I am not trying to keep any balance...
...No, I will not answer any questions like these...
...I was in the hospital too...
...But the young American considers this completely normal...
...How did it all start...
...I look at the posters hung about—advertisements for White Horse whiskey, Martinis, Coca-Cola...
...Of course we went up to the top of the Empire State Building...
...Even Mount Kazbek...
...I'm only trying to figure out what I did see...
...Another of our Soviet journalists, one who had lived in New York for four years, told me once: "America is a land of contrasts...
...All these things together are what really make up the architecture of America—confused and at the same time purposeful, overwhelming and bewitching, mathematically exact and anarchic...
...No, only the truth...
...It must be raining over Europe...
...Somehow I'm always ashamed when I see people take pleasure in the misfortunes of others...
...You in the air and I on the ground...
...Questions, questions, a hundred thousand of them...
...That would have made fine material for an article...
...There were cars sweeping by—low, wide, noiseless —but no people...
...A friend and I wandered along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago...
...Patrick Stanley...
...You should keep a balance of 50-50, as they say here...
...What are you laughing at...
...Belomor," I said...
...After all, he was responsible for all of us, 20 people he didn't know and who had only known each other for about 24 hours...
...In New York we parted, and in a jolly group, swinging their suitcases, they disappeared into the crowd...
...On this last question they talked rather vaguely, or sometimes facetiously: "First I'll open a business, and then I'll take over from Kennedy...
...The leader of our group, Ivan Ivanovich, was a fine person, but he had apparently been frightened ever since his childhood...
...I realized that perhaps not now, but in a few years they would be reading Faulkner...
...K. lectured on slums, unemployment, poverty . . . poor labor conditions...
...The famous slaughterhouses, canning houses, iron and steel...
...A murmur ran through the audience...
...It isn't easy...
...But it is these very things—the gigantic buildings, the gigantic cities, the superhighways cutting across the whole country with streams of cars flowing over them, the 20-story department stores, the endless bacchanalia of advertising signs, all the abundance and wealth that overwhelm you immediately—these are what prevent you at first from getting to the deeper and more important things...
...We walked across a bridge...
...What do you think of America...
...Through the porthole, it is getting light...
...A reference to a popular Russian song, based upon a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko...
...Let me run ahead a little...
...By this I mean not only the scope of their building technique, but their ability to combine the architecture of the buildings with the architecture of engineering...
...Belomor...
...A shy young man asked about alcoholism in America: Did they drink much there...
...He was always in a state of tension and anxiety, constantly counting us like chickens, and the worst that could happen to him was for someone to say: "I don't want to go to the National Gallery, I want to go to the Guggenheim, or maybe just take a little walk on Broadway...
...No one pays any attention to me...
...Lieutenant Patrick Stanley...
...I anticipate a thousand questions...
...I walked wherever my eyes took me...
...Don't look at us that way, Betsy...
...It was rather shameful...
...In Part One Nekrasov comments on this journalist: "On the third or fourth day [in America] he began to complain: 'When are they going to show us the slums...
...We'll be leaving in a minute...
...I only wish there had been...
...A gigantic city...
...everything is so slick, clean and comfortable.' I don't want to be like him...
...In Washington—no, I'm sorry, in Chicago—we saw one drunk who could hardly stand up...
...And its fascination...
...So it turns out that you and I have fought a war together...
...There was no one in the street...
...If you go to a foreign country looking only for the slums, why go...
...But now the weather had cleared...
...Even if he thought so, he would not say it out loud...
...He seems surprised...
...The car door opened and two boys poked their heads inside...
...New York time, I first stood on American soil, or rather American concrete, at Idlewild International Airport...
...There's nothing to write about...
...And then the questions...
...At this point, of course, it is hard to say which one of them will take over from Kennedy, but unfortunately it is true that at least a quarter of them will try to "open a business...
...I stepped out of the hotel, walked across Broadway to Grand Central, and took a subway uptown...
...I sit at a table sipping a beer and smoking one of my own cigarettes, a Belomor...
...Not all of them go for idealistic reasons, far from it...
...For some reason he dreaded this "little walk" most...
...I was ashamed, even though I knew, thank God, you don't meet people like K. all the time...
...And now we are sitting in uptown New York drinking beer...
...You were in Poltava and I was in Baku...
...I doubt it...
...What is it doing there...
...Voices gradually rose, and an argument started...
...I was even a little sorry for him...
...Someone will come out with, "Do the Russians Want War...
...No, in the hospital you learned to drink straight alcohol...
...In addition, we had a guide assigned to us by the American Express Travel Company, a lively, self-assured man in a bow-tie, Tadeusz Osipowicz, an emigre from Poland or the Baltic area...
...What kind of work do you do in Kiev...
...In the South they do keep the Negroes out, but that gives me no pleasure at all...
...Poor, poor Ivan Ivanovich...
...I don't mean to idealize all our youngsters who go out to the construction projects...
...But a good many of them do go because they believe they are needed there and because they are doing the country some good...
...This is the essence of it...
...Poverty and wealth, beauty and ugliness, side by side...
...If Ivan Ivanovich knew...
...He looks at my pack of cigarettes on the table...
...You and Jim must pay us a visit...
...The question of young people is an eternal one...
...Welcome...
...Right...
...Over Berlin...
...What Ivan Ivanovich feared most was any deviation from our daily schedule...
...It was 12 o'clock...
...Furthermore, I'm doing everything I can to avoid generalizing (I saw too little...
...It too was almost empty...
...A city...
...This is our last...
...there are viaducts and superhighways intersecting each other at different levels...
...And they'll all have to be answered...
...The subway runs infrequently at this hour...
...The Empire State and Chrysler Buildings come afterward...
...There was music playing, jazz, syncopated...
...What about the architecture...
...Instantly they disappeared, and a minute later our car was full of young people . . . boys of about 16 who were making a trip to New York for a few days...
...Later, Premier Khrushchev publicly censured the author for "attacking ideological clarity in literature and art under the pretense of fighting against a rhetorical and didactic tone...
...We usually think of the architecture of America as the architecture of skyscrapers...
...Beneath me stretched the Caucasus...
...Architect...
...In a way, I understood him...
...Snow and light frost...
...A fellow in a leather jacket lingers at the bar: He is counting his change...
...He has gray hair at the temples and deep creases around his mouth...
...And the trouble with it...
...You have good beer...
...There were 20 of us: teachers, journalists and engineers —what is known as the Soviet intelligentsia...
...I liked these youngsters...
...On our first day in New York, he set up the first production conference, the first "briefing session," at the entrance to the United Nations...
...How many Empire State Buildings and Chrysler Buildings and bridges like the swift, airy George Washington Bridge across the Hudson, how many useful things could be built with the money that is being spent on all those Polarises, Honest Johns, and other merry playthings of the 20th century...
...Two middle-aged men in overalls pay up and leave...
...Flying-Fortress...
...But while I was struck by the grandeur and beauty of nature around me there, on the observation platform of the Empire State I was struck by the grandeur and beauty of man...
...The sections presented here, all from Part II of Nekrasov's journal, were translated by Elias kulukundis...
...I've had enough fighting...
...I certainly don't want to go to war over it...
...Tadeusz Osipowicz stood off to one side and looked at us ironically...
...Is it true that a crime is committed every six minutes in New York...
...What about yours...
...On the corner of two narrow streets I came to a small bar...
...You must make good money if you can come here, here and back by plane...
...There was no bar, no Negro girl, there was no Patrick...
...Snow mixed with rain...
...It had been snowing...
...I am sitting alone in a bar in uptown New York, drinking...
...Patrick Stanley—Flying Fortress —Poltava airfield...
...Ah, Patrick, Patrick...
...We were not a delegation, we were tourists...
...Poor Ivan Ivanovich...
...May we talk to you...
...We'll have a good time together and, just like now, we'll hate to part...
...Gunner-radioman...
...You may...
...ON my last evening in America, I wanted to be alone...
...I offer him one...
...I'd rather see him buy that car after all, take his girl for a ride in it...
...We'll take you away from your tourist group and we'll introduce you to some good fellows...
...Not bad...
...Below us there were dozens of railroad tracks, freight and passenger trains moving, semaphores blinking .. . two workers in cradles screwing light-bulbs into the letter "o" of a giant "Coca-Cola...
...Of course, it is true that the Americans invented the skyscraper: They perfected the design, functional and esthetic at the same time...
...By the way, full-scale models of missiles stand in front of the various military institutions in America, just as the old cannons stood there in their time, and we even saw one of these missiles in the concourse of Grand Central Station...
...We talked about Moscow, New York, about our jackets, about war, baseball, movies . . . about plans for the future...
...Three men were talking quietly...
...And I don't want my son Jim to go to war over it either...
...he would simply be ashamed to...
...When i see slums I am sorry for the people who live in them . . . even in the capitalist world, which is alien to me...
...A city of financiers, magnates, clerks and workers...
...The audience burst out laughing...
...But the skyscraper is only one feature of America's architecture, or, rather, the American genius for construction...
...It's strong and cold...
...I must say that when you stand there above this city with the dozens of skyscrapers clustered together in the enormous space below you, with the little cars and tiny creatures crawling in the canyons among them, and beyond, the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Hudson, with its docks and ships—when you stand up there with the wind in your face and look down at this giant city or octopus city—whatever you want to call it—you can't help feeling excited...
...It is demanded by the iron laws of his society...
...They were being chaperoned by a teacher, not a young man, who was just as worried as our Ivan Ivanovich by this unexpected meeting of two worlds...
...the Seagram Building, Lever House, in New York...
...Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: "I foresee that roads, too, will become architecture, because they are fully capable of becoming that— great architecture...
...America's second city...
...Everything here was created by him, by his hands and by his brain...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 10
