THE RUSSIAN
INTERPRETER
Michael Frayn
Contents
Title Page
A Note on the New Edition
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About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
A NOTE ON THE NEW EDITION
I was once a Russian interpreter myself. This was in the early fifties, at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 had suddenly raised the possibility of war with Russia, and the British government realized that, refugees of Russian descent apart, who might have divided loyalties, we had almost no one on our side who would be able to perform basic intelligence functions such as eavesdropping on enemy communications or interrogating prisoners of war. Always supposing, of course, that we survived the ensuing holocaust long enough for there to be any communications to eavesdrop on, or prisoners to interrogate.
Military service was compulsory in Britain at the time, however, so there was a good supply of young men available, many of them supposedly with language skills because they had just spent their schooldays trying (usually without much success) to learn French. So, over the next ten years, partly in old army camps and partly in two universities, London and Cambridge, some six thousand of us were taught Russian, and trained to be translators and interpreters.
Even though the novel is not in any way autobiographical, in spite of the title, it was the Russian that I’d learnt on the Cambridge course that first took me to Moscow, and introduced me to the world in which the story is set. This was in 1956, when I was back at Cambridge as an ordinary undergraduate, and studying philosophy. Three of us who’d been on the National Service courses, together with two women who were now studying Russian for their degrees, decided that we’d like to have a look at the land where the language was actually spoken. I suppose we were driven by simple curiosity about what was going on behind that opaque and tightly drawn curtain – perhaps also to get some practical return on our labours.
Or possibly because we knew it was going to be so tantalizingly difficult to do, and would be such a triumph if we could bring it off. In 1956 the Soviet Union was still closed off from the rest of the world. There were no student exchanges, no private tourism. The only way to go was as a member of a ‘delegation’, sponsored by a fellow travelling organization, invited by some organ of the Soviet state, and limited to a strictly controlled timetable of visits to factories, collective farms, et cetera, et wearily cetera. We wanted to go under our own steam, like normal human beings. Our proposal was to spend a month at Moscow University following courses in our own subjects, then have five students from Moscow back to Cambridge for a month. We wanted, in short, to set up the first genuinely independent student exchange between any British and any Russian university.
It was perhaps a good moment to try. Stalin had died three years earlier, his successor Malenkov had come and gone, and the reign of Nikita Khrushchev had begun. No one knew much about him, until in February 1956, in a closed session at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, he made a secret speech acknowledging for the first time the terrible excesses of Stalin’s terror. The speech was soon disseminated around the Soviet empire. In Britain the Observer newspaper got hold of it, and devoted an entire issue to it – the first inkling the western world had that something in Russia was perhaps beginning to change. This gleam of hope was going to fade very soon. Only six months later, when the Hungarians rebelled and overthrew the Communist government that the Russians had imposed upon them, Soviet tanks would be sent in to restore it.
That spring, though, the signs still seemed slightly encouraging. Our leader was a determined and indefatigable psychology student called Rex Brown, who many years later became well known as an authority on decision theory. It was he who did most of the work, so far as I recall, writing endless letters to Russian officials, to our own university authorities, and to people in the British government who might be able to help us. Against all the odds our efforts succeeded.
Or seemed to.
In September, with the hard-won visas in our passports, we found ourselves aboard the Vyacheslav S. Molotov, the Soviet steamer that plied then between London and Leningrad (at any rate until Vyacheslav S. Molotov was discovered to be a member of the so-called Anti-Party Group, when it modulated tactfully into being the Baltika). In Moscow we were installed in Sector B, the well-appointed guest quarters of the university’s spanking new high-rise wedding cake on the Lenin Hills (previously and subsequently the Sparrow Hills), dominating the southern skyline of the city. And were presented with our timetable for the coming month: a series of visits to collective farms, the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, the Red October piano factory, et cetera, et only too predictably cetera.
The notes I made at the time record a series of ‘terrible’ meetings with the people in charge of us, where we protested that this was not what we had agreed to. In the end we went on strike. We refused to emerge from Sector B until the time-table had been withdrawn. All kinds of people – organizers, Komsomol (Young Communist) officials, concerned students – came to cajole us and plead with us. We were guests in someone else’s country – we couldn’t behave like this! The Red October piano-makers had been practising special songs to entertain us! They would be deeply hurt if we failed to turn up and hear them!
It was awful. But we stayed struck.
And in the end we prevailed. We were free to attend lectures, seminars, and classes unsupervised and unaccompanied. We became, so far as I know, what we had aspired to be – the first genuinely independent student exchange between a British and a Russian university.
Or at any rate half of one. Our rebellion had apparently scuppered the chances of the Russian group that we had been expecting. By the time I left Cambridge the following year they had still not arrived.
Nobody at Moscow University had ever seen anyone from the West before, so everyone wanted to talk to us. It was only later that we discovered how many of our apparently chance encounters in the refectory or the corridors had been, like so much else in Soviet life, pokazukha, as Russians call Potemkin villages and other false frontages pasted over reality; they had been orchestrated by Komsomol. Out on the streets, though, the pokazukha of the new Stalinist architecture didn’t entirely conceal the seedier reality behind it. Empty monumental prospects led to dusty backstreets lined with tumbledown wooden houses. The roofline of the central squares was broken by vainglorious slogans; on the pavements below it was difficult not to see the glistening contents of the spittoons. The sweet reek of men’s perfume warred with the smells of low-octane exhausts. In the woods to the west of the city there were still the heroic remains of trenches and shattered steel helmets, where the German advance was finally halted by the onset of the Russian winter in 1941; legless veterans scooted along the streets in little home-made trolleys, and the walking wounded held out one open palm for money, one raw amputated stump as explanation.
By the mi
d-sixties, ten years later, when I wrote the novel, a number of things were different. There were plenty of western students doing their year at Russian universities, together with postgraduates like my protagonist Paul Manning, and visiting businessmen like his old friend Gordon Proctor-Gould. But the underlying feel of the city remained much the same. I’d been back as a journalist by then, covering the visit of the British prime minister Harold Macmillan in 1959, and had written an account of walking round Moscow which had attracted a front-page article in Izvestia describing me as ‘a stinking rocket of the Cold War’. I subsequently went back several more times, on various missions, and each time my despairing Russian friends would say, ‘This place must change! It can’t go on like this!’ But it did, year after year, and the Moscow in which my novel is set is still pretty much the city that first etched itself so sharply upon my consciousness in 1956.
I look now at the dog-eared notes I laboriously typed up each evening during that first visit, and try to remember who all the people I mention were. It’s often difficult, because I changed the identifications of anyone who spoke at all freely, on the assumption that anything I wrote would be found and read.
Some of them, though, are easier to reconstruct because they have fictional counterparts in the novel. The well-worn assurance at the front that the characters and situations ‘are, of course, entirely imaginary’ isn’t quite true. Is it ever? But the originals in this case, given the nature of the Soviet state, needed disowning more than most.
The Sasha in the story is not entirely unlike the graduate student who was responsible for us: serious, anxious, loyal, charming – a born head boy. I see him with hindsight as a bit like Gorbachev, who had graduated from Moscow University the previous year; I don’t think we realized when we set out on our adventure that MGU (the G is for ‘State’) was the academy of the Soviet elite. Some of the students had developed a version of the flippant and laconic whimsy that was fashionable back in Cambridge – in both cases, I suppose, the playfulness of the privileged. One of them was the original for Raya, with her correspondence written on old playing cards and her teasing invitations to take part in the local hooliganism. But then my Katya is a bit like another girl who attached herself to us, and whose style was entirely out of keeping – a vulnerable innocence and simple religious belief that set her at odds with everyone and everything around her.
My Konstantin, too, had a prototype – a student who was reading philosophy. For some reason he decided he could trust me, and over the course of the month he talked to me with astonishing frankness. He was an officer of the local Komsomol branch, and it was he who told me how all those supposedly chance encounters had been set up. He assumed that if we were anywhere indoors we might be overheard by microphones or informers, so he would talk only in the open air, walking round the streets. This is one of the reasons I got to know them so well, and before we left I had worn the heels of my shoes down to the soles.
Even these unmonitored walks must have left a shadow of suspicion, though, because after we’d gone and he’d graduated the only job he could get was as a shop assistant. Then, in the inscrutable Soviet way, he was apparently rehabilitated, and put to work in the new field of computer design (which in 1956 had still been denounced as a ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’). He was a remarkable man, and for many years we kept in touch. I suppose I hoped my disclaimer in the novel, ten years later, would discourage the awakening of any retrospective interest in our conversations. Perhaps it worked. I managed with great difficulty to find him again when I was back in Moscow in 1973, and discovered that he was now a senior civil servant in Gosplan, the State Planning Agency. He was plainly embarrassed by my attempt to renew our acquaintance, and I didn’t pursue it.
A month or two after the novel came out Michael Powell bought an option on the film rights. He and Emeric Pressburger, in their long collaboration, had been among the boldest and most interesting British film-makers. The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann – they had all escaped the confines of cinematic naturalism and taken off into a more imaginative and fantastical world. His most recent film, though, Peeping Tom (made without Pressburger), had been cruelly dismissed by the critics for supposedly exploiting the voyeurism that was its subject. It has now, I think, been reinstated in the canon, and Powell’s reputation restored. But at the time his career was in low water.
It seemed to me unlikely that my novel would be the means of reanimating it, but I was taken by his bouncing enthusiasm and optimism. I was also intrigued by the archaic glamour of the world in which he moved. Our discussions often focused less on the film than on the restaurants that it would involve us eating in and the hotels we would be staying at. We needed to meet Pressburger, who was to write the screenplay, and who now lived in Austria. Should our rendezvous be in Vienna? If so, should we favour the Bristol or the Sacher? Or try the newly opened Palais Schwarzenberg? On the other hand, Paris might be more fun; dinner at the Tour d’Argent would surely help to get our imaginations working. At one point Alec Guinness (already in his fifties) was going to play Proctor-Gould (presumably still in his twenties). At another point it was Peter Sellers. Powell describes in his memoirs, Million Dollar Movie, how he and I drove out to the country in his ‘quivering black, open Bentley’ (tuned, he told me, by his personal mechanic) to pitch our project to Sellers. It was a freezing February day. Powell, if I remember rightly, was wearing goggles and a flying helmet. I was not. He arrived as assured and full of himself as ever, I almost too close to death to take much part in the negotiations.
I realized, when I read the memoirs, that his enthusiasm for the book had been more sincere than I suspected, and characteristically generous. One of the things that had attracted him was his love of the Russian character. But the Russians he had known seemed to be mostly the extravagantly eccentric members and hangers-on of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo, and remarkably unlike the dour Soviet citizens in my story. This, and all the discussions of restaurants and hotels, made me a little uneasy. A more immediately practical problem was how to do the Russian dialogue so that it was comprehensible to an English-speaking audience, when the point of so much of it was its incomprehensibility to Proctor-Gould and Manning’s waywardness in translating it for him.
Another, and even more fundamental, difficulty: how to represent the cityscape of Moscow, which features so largely in the story, when there was not the slightest prospect of getting permission to film there. The usual stand-ins for Moscow at the time were Dundee or Helsinki; and in Black Narcissus Powell and Pressburger had most magically conjured up an even more exotic location – a monastery in the high Himalayas – out of even more homely materials: studio sets and locations among the rhododendrons of Surrey. I can’t remember now why Pressburger, when we finally met him at his home in the Tirol, rejected all these ways to go. Instead he proposed using locations which were quite openly and recognizably parts of London, but with a little man on a bicycle who would cycle round changing the street names for each scene – covering up ‘St James’s Street’, in the particular instance that Pressburger offered, with a sign reading ‘Gorky Street’. This seemed to me wonderfully bold and witty, and very much in the fantastical spirit of his earlier films with Powell; but also totally ridiculous.
He subsequently wrote a draft of the screenplay which included the cyclist, but I think this is where the project finally died, on the corner of St James’s aka Gorky Street. When Powell’s option expired Peter Sellers picked it up himself. I had a letter from him in Beverly Hills saying that he had ‘two first class intellects working and thinking about how it should be scripted’. That was the last I heard of it.
An American theatre director, Philip Wiseman, later persuaded me to adapt it for the stage. I wrote the first two acts, with the streets of Moscow safely offstage, and gave up on the third. I’d been intrigued by the limitations that the form had imposed, though, and the experience of coping with them was one of the things that aroused (or re-ar
oused) my long-dormant interest in writing for the theatre.
By the time I’d begun the services Russian course, in 1952, the blockade of Berlin had long since been lifted, and I never had to interrogate any prisoners, or even (as some of my fellow linguists did) listen in to Soviet radio traffic. I did much later put it to good peaceful use, and translated a fair number of plays, mostly Chekhov, but including one about everyday life in Soviet Moscow. I even once or twice did a bit of interpreting. I wasn’t very good at it. My first effort was at a horrible drunken Soviet banquet marking the end of our stay in 1956, when I found myself sitting next to a fellow-travelling French crystallographer who said she wanted to make a speech and asked me to translate for her. I was about as drunk as Manning is in an incident in the book which is based on this, and made a rather similar error. As I gradually sobered up in my sleeper aboard the overnight Red Arrow express to Leningrad and the boat home, it slowly came to me that, although I had translated the speech (in favour of peace, international friendship, etc.) out of French reasonably adequately, the language into which I had translated it had been English instead of Russian. Not that anyone, at that stage in the evening, had appeared to notice.
Changes in the city did, of course, continue over the years, in spite of what my friends said. Entire landscapes of new housing appeared on the outskirts. The old tumbledown houses did, with the help of the town planners, finally tumble down. The foyers of the hotels that served hard-currency tourists and businessmen became the hunting grounds for high-class prostitutes and call girls. Then came Gorbachev and perestroika – and the last time I went, in 1988, to see one of my plays produced, I often found it difficult to believe my eyes and ears.
Now, though, the old Soviet world that I knew, at once harsh and easy-going, labour-intensive and lethargic, has vanished entirely. Or so I assume. I’m always being urged to go back to see another of my plays which has been in the repertoire of the Moscow Arts Theatre for ten years or so now. I keep putting it off. For one thing, I don’t want to reveal, even to myself, how bad my spoken Russian is these days, and quite how far I have declined from being any kind of Russian interpreter.
The Russian Interpreter Page 1