A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  How did the publication of Bolshevo Days in the New Yorker come about?

  LAUKHIN

  In 1969, Sunless Seasons appeared in Germany, in the wonderful translation by Dieter Rotloff. I’ve been very lucky in that two such superb poets have translated my poetry—Dieter Rotloff and the American Philip Korn.

  INTERVIEWER

  Fedya Malgunov translated your poetry into English too.

  LAUKHIN

  Yes, Fedya as well. Dieter spent one year at the Gorky Literary Institute in the fifties—that’s how we met—and his Russian is very good. More importantly, though, he’s a fine poet, with an amazing ear for Russian nuances. It’s a different story with Philip Korn. Sometime in 1969 Philip happened to see Dieter’s translation of one of my poems—Faraway Lanterns is its English title. Philip spoke no Russian at the time, or very little, but he knew enough German to want to read more of my poems. He wrote to Dieter. They had met a couple of times, but didn’t really know each other. Dieter sent him a copy of Sunless Seasons in German, and Philip translated a couple of the poems. He told his agent, Bart, about me, and approached the New Yorker with his translations. And so, in late 1969, the New Yorker published the two poems from Sunless Seasons that Philip had translated. I was surprised by the magazine’s interest in me, although Dieter told me during one of his frequent visits to Moscow that Bart and Philip were lobbying the weekly on my behalf. The outcome of their efforts was one of the June 1971 issues. I was on the cover. Well, it wasn’t me exactly, but some cowboy cartoon of me1. One of my students found a copy of that issue recently on Queen Street, here in Toronto, in a used bookstore, and had me sign it. I used to have a copy in Moscow, Colson Emslie brought it for me on one of his visits, but I left it there. I’m on the lookout for another copy.

  INTERVIEWER

  Bolshevo Days was in that issue, wasn’t it?

  LAUKHIN

  Yes, it was. Not in its entirety, it was a very long poem, but a large part of it. I had had great hopes for Bolshevo Days, thought I could publish it in the Soviet Union. There was an increased awareness of Tsvetayeva at the time. Her poems had been trickling back into the Soviet Union, and many were even published officially, but there was a reluctance to talk about what had happened to her, to her husband, Sergey Efron, and to their daughter, Alya. Or to Tsvetayeva’s sister, Anastasya, for that matter. I remember one editor at LitGazeta …

  INTERVIEWER

  That’s Literaturnaya Gazeta.

  LAUKHIN

  Yes. I remember the editor telling me that we should concentrate on the poetry, the magnificent poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva, and not on her fate or that of her family. He said they’d be glad to publish the stanzas dealing with her art and creative effort, but that even there he felt a few changes might be required.

  I couldn’t publish Bolshevo Days in the Soviet Union and could never understand why. It was fairly matter of fact, mainly events and personal emotions, with no political comments or interpretations. So, like Sunless Seasons, Bolshevo Days came out in samizdat, and for a while it was the talk of the town. And then the New Yorker published Philip Korn’s translation, and there was an explosion, the miracle I mentioned earlier. Philip, Dieter, Fedya Malgunov, and Bart did interviews about me with anybody interested. Colson Emslie as well, my good friend and colleague here in Toronto.

  INTERVIEWER

  Bolshevo Days is your longest poem by far. I cried when I first read it. I must have been fifteen or sixteen. I was in tears from the very beginning, when Marina is talking to Alya at the railway station in Moscow and then on the train to Bolshevo, asking her about the family and receiving only half-answers or none at all. Why wasn’t Seriozha in Moscow? Why in Bolshevo? Why was his last name Andreyev now, and not Efron anymore? Why hadn’t her sister Anatasya met her at the train station when she arrived from Leningrad? Arrested? Anastasya was arrested? What for?

  Did you write the prologue—Questions on the Train—first, or after you’d written the rest of the poem?

  LAUKHIN

  I wrote it toward the end. I already had three of the four main parts done when I decided to write the prologue.

  INTERVIEWER

  I read Bolshevo Days first in the New Yorker, and then I decided to get hold of the whole poem in Russian. I was in agony when Alya, pregnant at the time, was taken away from the house in Bolshevo, looking back and smiling at her helpless parents as she was walked away between her captors, the last time Marina saw her daughter. And I shared Marina’s torment and anger as she slowly figured out what was going on around her and her young son, both of them newly arrived in the Soviet Union to reunite the family. I shared her shock when she realized that her Seriozha, and possibly Alya too, had been working for the NKVD for many years.

  LAUKHIN

  Philip’s translation was masterful. It was Philip too who told Bart about Bolshevo Days. Bart got in touch with me and offered to be my agent. I thought he was mad—an agent for a poet? Especially one in the Soviet Union? It was a secret arrangement, of course. Bart came to Moscow in the spring of 1970 as part of an American delegation of publishers and editors, and he made sure he met me. He’s not having an easy time of it now, poor Bart, with the many delays of the journal.

  INTERVIEWER

  Why did you choose Toronto and its largest university?

  LAUKHIN

  Why not? It’s a beautiful campus, a very good university, with an interest and scholarship in Russian literature. It’s in the heart of a big city and I like big cities. And there are real winters here. Russians need solid, long winters.

  INTERVIEWER

  From what I understand, you had many offers from other universities.

  LAUKHIN

  True, I had offers. But, first of all, I wanted to be in North America—farther away from the Soviet Union than Europe. Also, one of my conditions was that I wouldn’t teach poetry writing or any kind of writing. That excluded many offers. I insisted on a light teaching load too. I needed time for my poetry and—more important to me at that time—to turn my father’s journal into publishable shape. Toronto went a long way to meet my conditions, and the endowment was instrumental. And Colson Emslie was in Toronto, and he and I had become good friends.

  INTERVIEWER

  Who made the endowment?

  LAUKHIN

  The donor wishes to remain anonymous.

  INTERVIEWER

  Private money?

  LAUKHIN

  Ha! Yes, private, capitalist money. The university had agreed to co-fund a new chair for me in Soviet Russian literature. That’s what I wanted to teach—good Soviet Russian literature. There is quite a substantial body of it: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Babel, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Grossman, Pilnyak, Mayakovsky. Others too. And Tsvetayeva, of course, although the Soviet label doesn’t apply to her. Newer writers and poets as well, like Yevtushenko, Akhmadulina, Vozhnezensky. Even little man Zladsky.

  INTERVIEWER

  And you?

  LAUKHIN

  And me, yes, why not? But I don’t teach my own poetry. There are also those who, while they wrote within the constraints of socialist realism, were still superb artists, wordsmiths, and they deserve to be known and studied. Writers like Ivanov, Paustovsky, Kataev, others. It’s worth studying them under a magnifying glass. Their works suffer terribly from being straitjacketed, but fragments of them have plenty of merit.

  INTERVIEWER

  You talk of a substantial body of good work in Soviet Russian literature, yet you made some incendiary statements about the Western assessment of it.

  LAUKHIN

  What are you referring to?

  INTERVIEWER

  It was a reaction following the interview with Zladsky in which, toward the end, he said he was horrified by what he’d heard you were doing with your father’s journal. He said, “I join cause with literary scholars and call it a crime. Since Artyom Laukhin defected to the West to find fame he has added only a self-pitying and confused lament to hi
s meager poetic output, and is now destroying—like a modern painter applying new colours and shapes to the Lascaux murals—the unique and valuable journals his father left.”

  LAUKHIN

  Ah, yes. Well, if fame in the West was what I was after, what better umbrella than Soviet Communism? Stalin could rise from his eternal slumber and easily make a case for it, an excellent case in fact, and those that followed him could do almost as well. Would Akhmatova, Mandelstam, or Pasternak—Zladsky too, of course—be famous today in the West were it not for the Communist persecutions? Would Pasternak have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature? Isn’t Mandelstam famous here mainly because of his wife’s depiction of their suffering under Stalin? And that silly sixteen-line poem about the Кremlyovskyi Gorets—the Kremlin Mountaineer, as it was often translated here, not that accurately—wasn’t that the only poem of his known over here? Wasn’t Akhmatova’s Requiem, probably her best poem, the direct result of Stalin’s fine work too? He had ordered her son’s imprisonment, and made sure that any parcel she brought for him required her to queue for a long time in the biting cold. He hired hundreds of walk-ons, other mothers and wives of prisoners, and they were there, queuing with her, each time she lined up. He was a superb stage director, Josef Stalin, patient, careful about the smallest details, all for the glory and fame of Soviet literature. Oh, he was very good at it, he could squeeze fame from his literary actors and actresses like toothpaste from a tube. He squeezed their life away too, sometimes, but that was the price they had to pay.

  INTERVIEWER

  That’s very cynical.

  LAUKHIN

  Perhaps. But not very. Tsvetayeva, the best poet of them all, is less well known only because she left Russia soon after the revolution and, while abroad, suffered only from poverty. Poverty was never enough to catch the attention of literary critics or of the brave members of the Academy in Stockholm, but terror and political repression went a long way.

  Yes, the persecution of writers was an admirable thing. How did Solzhenitsyn cannily put it—“not necessarily undesirable”? He’d know.

  The laurels we receive in the West are both a blessing and a curse. We can never be entirely sure of our worth. There’s always that nagging question: are we praised for our art or for of our persecution and suffering? I read recently in a biography of Solzhenitsyn that it is easier for a third-rate Russian writer to be translated into English, provided he provokes a political scandal at home, than a good French writer or an Italian one. Sad, but probably true.

  INTERVIEWER

  It applies to your poetry too.

  LAUKHIN

  Of course it does, although I was not involved in any major political furor. I would have been, but I was saved by my accident. My defection might have caused a bit of commotion, but by then the West knew about me because of Bolshevo Days. Indirectly, Bolshevo Days, my best work, no doubt, and the poem that made me famous, owes much to Stalin too. The tense household Tsvetayeva found in the Bolshevo dacha, the terrible revelations, the arrests of her daughter and then of her husband, the way Alya turned around and smiled at her mother for the last time, all these were delicate subplots and scene directions crafted by the chief puppeteer. Yes, he understood clearly—he had been a poet himself once—that the best poems are written in hell. Look, I have written nothing since I left, nothing except Poets in Heaven. No worthwhile poetry, that is. I am the living proof of Stalin’s subtle wisdom.

  INTERVIEWER

  When will Pavel Laukhin’s memoirs be in bookstores?

  LAUKHIN

  Ah, the sore spot. I wouldn’t use the word memoirs. Journal is the right term, an almost daily log of events, personal notes, and observations. Nine thick notebooks, seventeen hundred tightly handwritten pages—with often faded, hurried, abbreviated writing, difficult to make sense of—covering the literary scene of the late thirties, the forties, and most of the fifties. The first volume will be out in the fall. Yes, I know, I’ve made promises before, but this time I’m quite certain because the first volume is practically done.

  INTERVIEWER

  Which years are covered in the first volume?

  LAUKHIN

  The journal starts in the spring of 1936. The first volume ends at the end of 1940.

  INTERVIEWER

  How many volumes are you planning?

  LAUKHIN

  Four or five altogether. It ends in 1959. There aren’t many entries in the final year, as my father was ill and depressed.

  INTERVIEWER

  Literature being one of the islands of society, will your father’s journal do to Soviet literature what Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago did to the Soviet regime and society?

  LAUKHIN

  It’s nicely put, but it’s stretching the simile too far. My father’s journal will be of greatest interest to historians of literature. It will appeal to historians proper too, because it offers a personal view of almost twenty-five terrible years of Soviet life. It will captivate the lovers of literature, of course. I like to believe it will have other readers as well. They’ll find juicy bits and lots of gossip, since my father loved stories about people. They’ll find intrigue, literary infighting and skullduggery (often lethal, that’s Russia for you), literary opinions and commentary, encounters, notes about his own work and reactions to it, his reactions to the reactions to his work, his dreams as a writer. The drudgery of day-to-day Soviet life. New facts about Stalin’s terror. Mouthwatering, all of this, of course, but, I don’t delude myself, mainly to specialists and lovers of literature. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, a literary masterpiece, was and remains a scathing denunciation of a bankrupt and brutal regime. His best work by far.

  INTERVIEWER

  You are under immense pressure, but there are insinuations that you are delaying the publication of the journal on purpose. It’s been almost seven years since you left the Soviet Union. Why is it taking you so long?

  LAUKHIN

  My father’s entries are the notes of a man obsessed with putting everything down and at the same time worried that he’ll be caught with them. There are rambling, detailed personal notes that, now and then, are of little interest; mystifying abbreviations; meticulous and yet hurried handwriting. Pavel Laukhin walked and talked the official line, while being a witness to Soviet literary life—the literary Gulag, if it makes you happy. My father’s journal needed a lot of work, serious work, to separate the grain from the chaff, and to bake good, black Russian bread from it, solid, filling bread, smelling of the blood-soaked earth it came from. I knew it would take many years. True, I didn’t quite expect it would take me seven to bring out the first volume. There are many reasons for it. I am the first to blame, of course, but there are other causes. Keep in mind that when each volume comes out, it will be published both in Russian and English. I’m trying to do both versions at the same time—well, almost at the same time—with the help of my students and collaborators, and it’s not easy. I have to consider the needs of my students too.

  INTERVIEWER

  How do your students help you?

  LAUKHIN

  I first do the Russian version, of course. Each student then works on the translation of a segment, usually one related to his or her own studies. Once happy with the segment, the student returns it to me. Most times I send it back, asking for a rewrite. There are often several drafts. I am the one that puts them all together and work on the overall latest draft, and that sometimes results in further alterations. I try to make their output livelier, closer to the spirit of the Russian original, but I often add or—more rarely—remove material, because English language readers need context that Russian readers do not. Then back it goes to my students, mainly for grammar or awkward constructs. Whatever changes they make this time are again closely scrutinized by me. Then we work on another batch. In this way, many slices of the journal are moved along, each at different stages of completion.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’re doing some heavy editing on your father�
�s journal, including your own additions. Colson Emslie, your colleague here in Toronto, was asked in a recent interview about it. He said he had had a look at the manuscript of the first volume and compared parts of it to the original notebook entries. He commented that, let me quote him, “I have seen the difference between the raw material and the final product. Art Laukhin’s narration has muscle, immediacy, a romping, jaunting quality, a unique effervescence. It’s like being slapped constantly by the power, the forcefulness of his words. His father’s language is factual, weaker, almost dull by comparison, and Laukhin often has to break into it.” Most scholars, though, are saying that you’re committing a crime by altering your father’s entries. They are horrified. They say these are not Pavel Laukhin’s daily entries anymore, but Art Laukhin’s interpretation of them.

  LAUKHIN

  They are footnotes to literature, not scholars. They should all be sent to Kolyma, all of them. I adored my father. I feel I am writing with him when I weave my own words with his. I wouldn’t do it any other way. I toyed for a while with the idea of using different typefaces to separate his writing from my own, but I soon gave up on it. It was too cluttered. A transcript and an unedited English translation will be available later to anyone interested, and my father’s notebooks will be gifted to the university. Believe me, it’s the best way, especially for the English version of the journal. People and events need introductions, and places, customs and ceremonies must be described. It would be all footnotes, otherwise, and I abhor footnotes. Even the original Russian version will make sense to only a few, and these few are getting old.

  INTERVIEWER

  Where do you work?

  LAUKHIN

  I write poetry—write, that’s an odd verb to use, since the writing is the least part—just about anywhere, as most of the time I’m putting it together it in my head. If you’re asking about the work on the journal, both at home and at the university. I work with my students at the university, but when I have to concentrate, to really put my nose to the grindstone, as you people say, it’s at home. I have a large room on the second floor of the house, quiet, with windows facing south. I like a lot of light.