Limited Reading in Moscow
GREEN, ASHBEL
Perspectives LIMITED READING IN MOSCOW BY ASHBEL GREEN By any standard it was an extraordinary event: Eight of the Soviet Union's most prominent writers gathered in a private room of a downtown...
...Although approximately 1,500 publishing imprints from 63 countries (including Israel, making its first appearance at a Soviet trade fair since relations were broken off in 1967) participated in the fair, most of the U.S...
...In a sense, it symbolized the eight days of relative good will in the still uncertain world of Soviet-American literary dealings...
...Perspectives LIMITED READING IN MOSCOW BY ASHBEL GREEN By any standard it was an extraordinary event: Eight of the Soviet Union's most prominent writers gathered in a private room of a downtown Moscow restaurant to be feted by their American publishers, who were attending the first Moscow International Book Fair (September 6-14...
...Book publishing has always been a strained marriage between commerce and art...
...Among the volumes removed by customs officials were George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984...
...Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer and Joseph Heller's Something Happened were among the more unexpected novels to interest Moscow editors, who are apparently selecting best-sellers without ideology or much sex...
...Another was Daniel Yergin's widely-reviewed study of the origins of the Cold War, Shattered Peace, perhaps too new to be known by customs officials...
...Catalogues describing works by and about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Trotsky and other Russians beyond the Soviet pale were generally impounded as well...
...A Polish publisher disclosed that last year 120 French and 180 English-language books were translated into Polish...
...On the third day a pavilion official asked Ardis to take down its popular poster—"Russian Literature is Better than Sex"—explaining that he was worried about the impending visit of several ministers of state...
...The fair was situated in the Park of Economic Achievement, a large expanse about 20 minutes north of Red Square, among exhibits of agricultural equipment, manufacturing displays and Yuri Gagarin's Vostok rocket...
...While few would question that Americans are producing more popular books than their Polish counterparts, the fact is that Poland is undergoing intellectual ferment, forcing one to wonder whether Western editors are diligently searching for outstanding writers there...
...Several prominent nonconformist writers openly spent time at the booths...
...About 40,000 paperbacks of considerable variety were purchased from NAL and Penguin for sale in Moscow bookstores, but they will be bought in a matter of hours...
...a study of the Sino-Soviet conflict in Eastern Europe...
...Still, when an American publisher asked his Soviet colleagues about the imprisonment of certain writers, he was told that was none of his business...
...Thus UPI's account of the third day was near the mark: "The sound of cash register bells today came close to drowning out the controversy over censorship at the first Moscow International Book Fair...
...American publishers were concerned about the oppression of Soviet writers and the prospect of censorship...
...exhibitors were technical and educational houses...
...reportedly turned down a contract for financial reasons...
...Their attempts to ascertain beforehand what books would displease Soviet authorities were useless...
...Scientific and art publishers, such as John Wiley, Pergamon, Thames & Hudson, Prentice-Hall, and Times-Mirror reported substantial purchases of up to six figures...
...others like Andrei Bitov, Vas-ili Aksenov and Bulat Okudzhava are members of the Writers' Union—and the reasonable hour that everyone went home...
...American publishers visited their authors, dissident or not, without interference...
...At a booth shared by Ardis and the London art publisher, Thames & Hudson, where only six people were allowed in every 10 minutes, one Russian tried to bribe his way to additional time...
...True, few translations from any language find a substantial audience in the U.S...
...Nevertheless, during the same period published translations increased here by more than a third, and between 1971-75, Russian translations issued in America grew from an annual figure of 126 to 191...
...Neither the Vietnamese nor the Cubans, though, were prevented from displaying polemics directed at the United States...
...European and American publishers were astonished at this enthusiasm (or hunger, or thirst, depending on the wire service you read) for their books...
...American publishers would very much like to establish an English-language bookstore in Moscow...
...Ashbel Green is a vice president and senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf...
...The same is true to an almost pathetic extent in the smaller Socialist countries...
...a history of the Italian Communist party...
...Perhaps the most amusing incident involved Ardis, a Michigan firm specializing in Russian authors...
...Because its manufactured products cannot compete in world markets, it is very wary of projects that would drain its monetary reserves...
...The evening was marked by genuine conviviality and numerous toasts, the guests' wide range of views—some like Roy A. Medvedev, Vladimir Voinovich and Lev Kopelev are classified as dissidents...
...The problem is not so much censorship as hard currency, or more specifically, the USSR's severe trade deficit...
...Indeed, the blacklist was covered by a broad edict against "books preaching war, race or national discrimination, offending the national dignity of other exhibitors, publications incompatible with Soviet ethics...
...Kurt Vonnegut Jr...
...Some surprising titles survived customs...
...If relations between the Soviet and American literary worlds continue along their present course, and if there is no severe harassment of Russian authors in the interim, the next Moscow fair in 1979 will no doubt attract a much larger and more varied group of companies from the United States and other countries in the West...
...On Sunday, the crowd was so large that at one point all 150 titles being displayed by Harper & Row were in the hands of Russian readers...
...Emotional scenes could be witnessed at the Israeli and American Jewish booths, as Russian Jews read Hebrew prayer books on the eve of Rosh Hashanah...
...We have a paper shortage," a Russian editor said, "and if we reissue a popular book, then another will not be printed...
...But the pressing problem of the Soviet writer's freedom will remain...
...The Russians offered flat payments of $3,000-7,000 for Western books...
...In the past five years only three translated novelists—Solzhenitsyn, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Lothar Buchheim—plus a handful of nonfiction authors have made it to the New York Times best-seller list...
...For middle-class Russians, who have some money to spend and not much to spend it on, books constitute a reasonably-priced status symbol—when they can be obtained...
...Only Harper & Row and the Times-Mirror Company (NAL, Abrams) displayed a significant number of general books...
...Book exhibitions are not primarily literary occasions: They are meant to facilitate the exchange of translation rights among publishers of many nations...
...The obverse of Russian interest in Western writers is a lack of readership for Soviet authors in the U.S...
...The first reason for this was ideological...
...such decisions, they were told, would be made when cartons were unpacked on the pavilion floor...
...Organized around the theme of "Books for Peace and Progress," the fair did not welcome titles that were "incompatible in content and design with Soviet legislation...
...Activity heated up at the fair, though, with contracts offered for novels by John Updike, Gore Vidal, Irving Stone, Reynolds Price, Robert Penn Warren, Michael Crichton, and John Gardner...
...The presence of the last was an unfortunate coincidence in a week marking the centenary of the birth of Felix Dzer-zhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police...
...Morning hours were restricted to librarians (the Soviets have a very large library system), scholars and representatives of Russian publishers, who issue books in 53 languages...
...With the traditionally biggest and most successful of these to be held at Frankfurt (where the Russians are a major participant) five weeks later, it was sensibly asked what there was to be gained at Moscow...
...he inability of Russian authors to write and publish in their own country without restriction adds to the discomfort...
...The second reason was financial...
...With the Belgrade review of the Helsinki accords on European security and cooperation beginning in October, the Soviets were plainly using the fair to prove their good intentions...
...by contrast, one Polish book was rendered into French and three into English...
...In the afternoons, however, and all day on the weekend, the public was admitted, and tens of thousands of Russians flocked to this window on the West...
...Clearly, the Russians were rewarding those who made the trip...
...In sum, about 40-50 books out of some 50,000 were held back, and many were returned after overnight examination...
...and The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia...
...Visitors asked many exhibitors if they could borrow books overnight, and pilferage was common until security was improved...
...Since the USSR joined the Universal Copyright Convention in 1973, Soviet publishing—as represented by its copyright agency VAAP—has been slow to acquire translation rights to Western fiction and nonfiction...
...One was a Brookings Institution study, Sizing Up the Soviet Army, that contains information few Russians are privy to...
...Soviet TV recorded the signing of an agreement for The Thorn Birds at the Harper & Row exhibit...
...and most European countries...
...Students copied pages from Jane's Fighting Ships and Jane's All the World's Aircraft...
...Ardis displayed Russian-language books by Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and other Russian authors unavailable to their countrymen...
...A visit to Dom Kniga—House of Books—in the Soviet capital one afternoon revealed a great deal of customer traffic, yet little to buy besides Marxist and Leninist tracts and technical volumes...
...Except for censorship, the Soviets kept a loose rein on the fair and its attendant activities...
...In this vacuum, considerable self-censorship took place in the United States...
...Roughly 50,000-100,000 of each will appear, and they will sell out in a day or two...
Vol. 60 • December 1977 • No. 24
