Richard Yatzeck
P r e fa c e The account which follows embraces three kinds of Russian occasions, pretty much in chronological order. In 1961-2, I spent a year in Moscow as a graduate student, working on my dissertation. Between 1968 and 1997, I accompanied six groups of students and one group of alumni on tours of European Russia. In 1991 and 1997 I directed semester programs for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest-Great Lakes College Association in the south Russian city of Krasnodar. In between, I taught Russian literature at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Herein, I attempt to give form to my experience. I believe that I have something to add to the ongoing discussion, in the Western press as in every Russian kitchen, of the two perennial questions: “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?” Both are book titles and the major questions regarding Russia’s fate. My mite, however, in the sea of Russia discussion, does not pretend to answer these questions, but is rather an effort to describe the tea-and-vodka-ringed pine table over which these questions are raised: private Russia. As my Russian is decent, though not native, and my experience lengthy, I hope to be able to interest you mightily in this strange place which I have learned to love. I do not intend to deal mainly with political matters as such. I will try, 9
Russia in Private
rather, to show what the Russia of my experience, between 1961 and 1997, has been able to teach me about a way of life quite foreign to, but not always less attractive than, the “certain certainties” of American and European culture. When I return from Russia, ten times now since 1961, most people are utterly incurious about the place. “Why do you go there?” is the most frequent query. When I explain that I teach Russian literature, my reason seems sufficient, if esoteric. No more questions. There were two “questioners” at our basement apartment door three months after my first wife, Lois, and I returned in 1962. These FBI men queried, “Were you asked to be spies?” Then they warned: “Let us know if you are approached.” They gave us a phone number. That encounter was telling. Even the FBI was, essentially, incurious. They “knew,” to the point of boredom, what Ronald Reagan thought when twentyfive years later he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Who would want to be a Russian spy? Hadn’t the media made it clear that Russia was the most wretched, ghastly place on earth? Everyone knew all about Russia. If the FBI had been interested, I could have given reasons for my interest in Russia. In an unhappy family, I read a lot: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy included. In college one redhead and two films, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann moved me from pursuing moneymaking engineering to the less promising humanities. German and Polish roots started me on languages. Labor union and Hungarian socialist friends pointed me east. What I really wanted was to belong to that warm, thoughtful world that 10
Richard Yatzeck
Turgenev seemed to represent, to escape the banal, dollar boosterism which, as I thought then, was all that America had to offer. Now, fifty years later, I think that Russia was attractive to me because the characters of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were not exotic, but rather very close to the subsistence farmers who largely raised me. The excuses of sociology for human faults were simply beyond the pale of my models. Belief in taking responsibility for oneself in a difficult life was so prevalent in Genesee village that no one needed to brood upon it. When I chose Russia as my subject matter and as my career it was, I guess, because Russia was the closest thing to Genesee village that I had ever come upon, not because of my green Marxism. My left-wing youth has mellowed, much too much, into middle-class comfort. Neither have I escaped the occasional foray into sociological excuse making. Still, for fifty years, private Russia has provided the generosity, idealism, and warmth which I hoped to find in her, as I found it on an eleven cow dairy farm in Wisconsin in the thirties. Perhaps, here, I will be able to convince you of this.
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Russia in Private
Chapter I Moscow Exchange Year, 1961-62 My wife, Lois, and I arrived in Moscow by train via Paris, Prague, and Warsaw in September 1961. As I was in Moscow to write a dissertation on Maxim Gorky’s dramaturgy, it should be clear that Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia had not yet cured me of socialist romanticism. During a Fulbright year in Hamburg, an émigré Russian woman had indeed overcome much of my ignorance. At the same time, her warmth and the bewitching sounds of spoken Russian (we traded language lessons) made Russia as attractive as the Soviet Union had been to me, an ignorant, nineteen-year-old, self-styled Marxist. When I studied at Moscow State University, thanks to the cultural exchange treaty blessed by Nikita Khrushchev and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959, I was a card-carrying liberal. I’d voted for Adlai, gladly. If pushed, I would have admitted that I was in Russia to find a life, if not socialist, at least not aspiring to middle class. I gradually made out the features of such an existence - that’s the secret thread here - and it was not socialist and not middle class either. Life for most Russians had little to do with such political and social distinctions at all. Neither socialist asceticism nor bourgeois consumption, in our sense, played any significant public role in 1961 Moscow. Cultural consumption was another matter. My advisor’s lectures on 12
Richard Yatzeck
Gorky and a desk at the Lenin Library comparable to Marx’s nest at the British Museum made up my professional life. In the evening, though, Madison, Wisconsin, my cultural home until then, paled before the lively and various theatrical and concert life of Moscow. In his lectures, Professor Vysotsky seemed to imply that Gorky’s dramas, like Lenin’s electricity, had guaranteed a Communist future. However, he had a beautiful, prerevolutionary academic accent, Polish “I” (which sounds like “w”). After four years of practice, I was just beginning to grasp spoken Russian, and his lectures, though socialistically dutiful, went down like Chopin. Then, privately, the professor suggested newer and more daring playwrights than Gorky, and arranged a week-long excursion to Leningrad, Peter the Great’s “window on the West,” for Lois and me. Once, when I visited him in the hospital, suffering from heart trouble, he insisted, like all Russian hosts, that I absolutely must share his hospital breakfast. This natural generosity I have found throughout the fifty years of my association with Russia and still utterly admire. As regards evening activities, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 had transformed, and at least partially liberated, the dramatic arts. One could choose Evgeny Shvarts’s The Naked King, a relevant remake of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” or Brecht’s Mother Courage, though Brecht had always been suspect in Moscow. From the past, but by no means irrelevant, was all of Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theater, albeit in the turn-of-the-century Stanislavsky productions. Swan Lake or Boris Godunov in sumptuous settings at the Bolshoy Theater 13