Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Trifonov, whose own father fell to the unanswerable workings of tyranny, and who as an author had to maneuver his realism into print through the ever-present maze of official scruples, must have had little use for characters like Glebov. He portrays him as timid, indecisive, and materialistic; yet the timidity and indecision are so empathetically limned, and the materialism (Glebov is a great noticer of clothing and furniture, with all the social resonance of such possessions) such a basically humble attribute, that the reader, like Glebov’s betrayed fiancée, Sonya, loves him in spite of himself. An apparatchik could hardly be more tenderly dismantled. The boy in his poverty begins by trading on the one meagre advantage he has: his mother sells tickets in a movie theatre and can let him in free, with what friends he chooses to bring. He ends, successful and afflicted by arteriostenosis, by failing to buy an antique table he had his heart set on; further, he is snubbed by a workman at the furniture market, whom he has suddenly recognized as a once powerful and flamboyant old school friend. A bit later, this same friend’s mother, a former aristocrat also fallen in the social scale, has snubbed him on a train to Paris. We never see Glebov oppressing others, but only Glebov oppressed—oppressed not least by the need to make decisions. A splendid turn in the plot occurs when, on the eve of a fateful meeting at his university, where he must testify on one side or the other, his grandmother Nila, whom he loves (“Who else was there to love, if not old Nila?”), dies as if to spare him, on his day of mourning, this crossroads:

  “What can I say to you, Dima?” She looked at him with pity, with tears in her eyes, as though he and not she were dying: “Don’t upset yourself, don’t aggravate your heart. If there’s nothing to be done about it, then don’t think about it. It will all sort itself out, you’ll see, and whatever that may be, it will be the right way.…”

  And strange to say he fell asleep that night easily, calmly and free of nagging anxiety. At six o’clock next morning he was suddenly awakened by a low voice, or it may have been by something else, and he heard someone say, “Our Grandmama Nila has gone.…”

  … Quietly, for fear of disturbing the neighbors, Aunt Paula was sobbing on the other side of the partition. The sound she made was strange and chilling, like the clucking of a chicken whose neck was being wrung. Glebov’s father came in, muttering something about the doctor, a death certificate and the need to go somewhere. So began that Thursday. And Glebov was unable to go anywhere on that day.

  Glebov’s melancholy rise in the world is traced among so many such vivid vignettes and small scenes as to summarize the general flow of Russian life from 1940 to 1974. He is described, by the first-person voice whose disquisitions rather jarringly interlard Glebov’s story, as “a nothing person”; but into this nothing, this cautious acquisitor of things, so much observed life rushes that a less passive and more principled hero would have seemed less human. “He dreamed of all the things that later came to him—but which brought him no joy because achieving them used up so much of his strength and so much of that irreplaceable something that is called life”: a moral for many a capitalist tale as well.

  At a student party in A House on the Embankment, one guest is “a poet who had been deafening people at student parties with his crashingly metallic verses—in those days, for some reason, they were regarded as highly musical.… Nowadays, thirty years later, the poet is still grinding out his brassy verse, but no one any longer thinks it musical—just tinny.” It is a compliment, of sorts, to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s fame and durability that a Westerner, without presuming to judge what verse sounds brassy in Russian, thinks first of him in relation to this unkind allusion. Born in 1933 and still going strong, Yevtushenko has managed to steer a daredevil course amid the perils of being a poet, a crowd-pleaser, a sometime protester, a travelling emblem of Russian culture, and lately a movie director and actor—all this within the Soviet system, which since Lenin has insisted on its right to supervise the arts. Khrushchev, whose sanctioning of the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in late 1962 unleashed hope for freer expression, personally took it upon himself, a few months later, to bring Yevtushenko to heel. More recently, Yuri Andropov publicly complained that “Trifonov and others devote too much concern for the minutiae of daily life without sufficient regard for the good of the Party, for whom they are not doing their bit.” The Party has continued to allow Yevtushenko access to print and audiences because, my guess is, for all his rakish and rebellious tendencies he is a sincere patriot and genuinely at home in the poster-bright, semi-abstract realm of global aspiration wherein the slogans of the Revolution make some sense. Gone are the days, in Russia and the West alike, when he and Andrei Voznesensky were glamour boys, bringing to stadiums and auditoriums on both sides of the Iron Curtain word of the new possibilities stirring under Khrushchev. But neither poet has been silenced in the airless decades since, and Yevtushenko, who had earlier composed some short stories and a banned memoir (A Precocious Autobiography, 1963), published in 1981 a first novel that sold two and a half million copies. This book, Wild Berries, is now published here, in a typeface that looks muddy and a sexy pastel dust jacket that depicts two haystacks.

  Yevtushenko, as a fiction writer, woefully lacks Trifonov’s quality of patient truth—of calmly accruing detail, of psychologies permitted to find their own definition in inconsequential and contradictory movements. In Wild Berries the author is ostentatiously in charge, putting an epilogue first and a prologue last and, in between, pouring on importance from an unctuous overview, staging symposia and meaty dialogues in the Siberian taiga, importing significance-laden scenes from as far away as Hawaii and Chile. As a poet, Yevtushenko has developed an irritating trick of self-echo, as if repeating things renders them profound. Wild Berries begins, for example, with a hail of berries, as symbols of succulence, Siberian freedom, and female charms. A seduced and spurned woman ponders, “He’s picked all my berries, and now he’s looking for new berry patches”; another, also seduced and spurned woman sports “red bilberry nipples” and “dark, berrylike birthmarks” “sprinkled” on her “soft but blinding white” skin; and still another, while being seduced preliminary to being abandoned, has a full basket of berries spilled over her (of course) “naked breasts.” Nor are berries the only foodstuff subject to overutilization; mushrooms, too, come in for a workout. A proposal of marriage is stimulated by the discovery of a “solid white mushroom” that the lady cuts off neatly, “leaving the root in the ground”; a few pages later, the children of this union are seen as “sturdy as white mushrooms.” A few chapters on, an old mushroomer extols the earthy virtue of his speciality and, when his extolling day is done, dreams of “some extraordinary forest, where giant mushrooms grew taller than a man.” His dreamwork leaving no symbol unturned, he cuts a gigantic one down so he can take it “to Hiroshima and show all mankind, to make them ashamed of that other, terrifying mushroom, invented by man.”

  The translator has matched the overwrought prose with some extraordinary efforts of English:

  A wave of grandeur swept over his beak-nosed, time-ravaged face and washed away the wrinkles.

  He had a cautious attitude toward social initiatives, feeling that in the long run they broke up into droplets against the moss-covered cliff of human psychology.

  “And only when the boat was right inside the rapids’ open jaws, dripping foamy saliva from the boulders that sat as solidly as molars …”

  “Screw all these artists and correspondents,” roared the president, something he did very rarely.

  The heavy ore that holds these nuggets is the story of a party of geologists looking for cassiterite and the meaning of life in the taiga of Siberia; since Yevtushenko was born and bred in Siberia, and his father was a geologist, some authenticity leaches through his nobly hulking intention to write a panoramic novel of ideas. The stylized characters (hard-driving, out-of-touch-with-himself Kolomeitsev, the leader of the expedition; young, impressionable Seryozha; humpbacked, sof
thearted, highly mechanical Kesha; all-wise, often-silent Burshtein; fawning, villainous Sitechkin; and many others, not to mention the interchangeably delicious, berry-breasted young females who pop up in the forest like, well, mushrooms) and the stilted conversations (“If man came from the apes, then why didn’t all the apes turn into people?” one man asks another as they head into some thundering rapids; the answer runs, in part, “Once upon a time the magnetic equilibrium of the earth was destroyed. And then some of the weaker apes underwent mutation”) do not totally smother the author’s joy in the space and sweet wildness of Siberia. His willingness to entertain basic questions is awkwardly allied with his coarsely imagined tale of adventure and seduction, of peasants who are diamonds in the rough and women who are loose cannons: “Her mighty breasts surged menacingly out from the shiny picture like a battleship’s guns.” In the absence of a restraining verisimilitude, the tale branches into such unusual familial scenes as that of a one-time seducer, now grown obese and decrepit, being given a prostate examination by a forty-three-year-old doctor who is, her “malachite eyes” tell him, his long-lost illegitimate daughter, and that of the reunion of four young American rock stars with their mothers, after a tumultuous concert, on a beach in Honolulu, where “the pure breeze from the ocean seemed to blow away the sweaty stink of the concert’s roaring crowd.” The scenes involving Americans, though they show that Yevtushenko has been around, have a patent falsity, a benign corniness, that serves as index to the falsity of Wild Berries throughout: the book is a pastiche, an assemblage of out-sides and signifiers with no real insides or unwilled significance. Yevtushenko’s inner self, glimpsable in A Precocious Autobiography and such early poems as “Zima Junction,” shows here only in the brash naïveté of the novel’s ambition.

  The numerous characters in Trifonov’s novellas fall into a consistent pattern. There is the generation of the aged, who were exposed to the heat and excitement of the Revolution and still feel it. There is that of the young, the punks and softies, who have felt only the heat of the West and its corrupting consumerism. And there is the middle generation, which fought and endured World War II; its members lack their parents’ political certainties yet are nagged, unlike their children, by a collective conscience, by the suspicion that the blessings of peace and its relative prosperity, achieved through heroic victories over the Czar and then the Germans, are not enough, and fall short of some ideal. Glebov, for instance, has done nothing very wrong; yet he and the narrator seem to suspect and to imply that he is terribly in the wrong. Yevtushenko has now reached fifty and, however young at heart, belongs to the middle generation. A sophisticated and restive spirit, frequently at odds with the Soviet establishment and a staunch protester against the anti-Semitism that is one of Russian ethnocentricity’s uglier aspects, he is no Party-liner; but in his role as bard, and now as novelist, he comes up with Socialism’s blandest pieties: “Cassiterite? What is it compared to human lives?” “But what good is honesty, physical courage, or diligence, if people are cynics?” “The only thing that could end war forever is changing the human psyche. Those who fly up above earth and see her in all her beauty and fragility will undergo a psychological change. At first only individuals, but then hundreds, then millions. It will be a different civilization, a different humanity.” Wild Berries, set in the scarcely tamed spaces of the Soviet hinterland, should be a comfortable, rollicking book; but instead it is a book with a bad conscience, by a writer who wants to feel more than he does, and one that, whenever it might develop some natural momentum out of its own low impulses, is slowed to a halt by another injection of anxious high-mindedness.

  There is little about the handsome but staid jacket of Russian Women: Two Stories, or the resolutely unglamorous photograph of the stout, elderly authoress on the back, or Maurice Friedberg’s solemn introduction to prepare us for the adroitness of the text itself. “I. Grekova”—from the French, i grec, for the letter “y”—means something like “Ms. X” and is the pen name of Yelena Sergeyevna Ventsel, a mathematician born in 1907, whose first fiction was published when she was fifty years old and a full university professor. (Scientific training is far from uncommon among Soviet creative writers: Solzhenitsyn was a teacher of physics and mathematics; Voznesensky was educated as an architect; and a number of prose artists from Chekhov to Vassily Aksyonov have been accredited doctors.) However trained, I. Grekova possesses to a rare degree the fiction writer’s necessary gift of getting her material to speak for itself, through actions, sensations, and images. For instance, a grieving woman at her husband’s funeral:

  Vera Platonovna, deaf and dumb from crying, sat next to the coffin. Her hands, always so nimble, hung down lifelessly. They seemed not to belong to her. She felt grief not in her heart, but rather in her ears. Her world seemed soundless. Perhaps the whole world had gone deaf, not just she. The chair on which she sat seemed both too small and too big—in any case, not meant to be sat on.

  Yet, on the next page, some sound does break through to her:

  And now, in the streaming light of the candles, he seemed frighteningly alive, truly alive, and displeased with his wife. The hands folded under his chest had a pink tint, and the watch on his wrist was still ticking. The watch was old, prewar, a gift from the People’s Commissar, with an inscription: “For Outstanding Service.” Shunechka never took it off, even slept with it.

  This strangely (but not implausibly) ticking watch calling out from the coffin to this so recently widowed woman sitting in a chair that feels both too big and too small has just that oddness of specificity which puts us there, and which brings emotion out of images. The comical homeliness of death is evoked, and a bit of the horror—the watch will be buried alive! Further, the dead man has been in the habit of tapping his watch as a disciplinary gesture to his wife, and we know, though she still hears it, that the watch will soon run down. Throughout her two long stories, the author easily transforms real details into the intertwining, chiming stuff of narrative. Her prose is light, candid, and unforced. Her topic is the independent, professional female, amid the Soviet Union’s throngs of career women.

  The first, and much shorter, story of the two bound together here, “Ladies’ Hairdresser,” was published in the magazine Novy Mir in 1963. Though I. Grekova was in her fifties when she wrote it, it has the happy freshness, the light-handed confidence, of a writer newly come into her material. It tells of a middle-aged female mathematician’s rather maternal relationship with a twenty-year-old male hairdresser called Vitaly. The mathematician, Marya Vladimirovna Kovaleva, directs a Moscow computer institute and has two sons, Kostya and Kolya, both in college; their impudent, slovenly, clownish behavior at home is enough described, in lively and droll dialogue, to indicate why she would develop a soft spot for this hairdresser of her sons’ generation but without their educational advantages. Vitaly is a conscientious genius at his craft, and she goes to him often, to be beautified and to advise him in his self-education. Her dim but pretty secretary, Galya, admires Marya’s hair, goes to Vitaly for her own hair, and has a fling with him. But he, like most standouts, runs afoul of the system—specifically, the bureaucratic Hairdressing Section of the Service Administration—and has to be snipped down to size. At the tale’s end he tells Marya that he is quitting hairdressing to become an apprentice metalworker and to go to college. She replaces the receiver thinking, “There’s something here I missed.” Her relations with the younger generation have been consistently fond but bemused; when she attends a Komsomol dance, she stares in reverie at the girls’ shoes:

  And the shoes—shoes, shoes, shoes—imported, weightless, thin, with pointed toes, and almost invisible heels. More power to those who walk unfalteringly on such marvelous inventions, I can’t. And dancing with the shoes are the men’s short boots, or open-toed sandals, or sometimes high boots. And there are many—oh so many—high heels with high heels, girls dancing with each other. They dance elegantly, aloof, as though they don’t need anything else. Oh you girl
s, you poor girls. The war’s long been over, another generation has grown up, and there are still too many of you.

  Women with women is the theme, too, of “The Hotel Manager” (1976), the story of Vera Platonovna Butova, who was born in 1895 and at the age of eighteen was swept off her bare feet at the seashore by a stern-faced military officer called Alexander Larichev; she marries him and is his wife for twenty-seven years, and then becomes a hotel manager, with a lover and, at the age of sixty, an offer of promotion to Moscow. Though her marriage and subsequent affairs are convincingly described, a deeper warmth of interest is generated by Vera’s relation with her mother (Anna), her sister (Zhenya), her best friend (Masha), her adopted daughter (Vika), her housemate (Margarita), and her female colleagues at the Hotel Salute. “The staff of the hotel consisted almost entirely of nervous, middle-aged women.… They were morbidly vain, hypersensitive, poorly paid, but how those women worked!… [Vera] demanded not a show of work but genuine work, and got it.” For I. Grekova’s women, love comes and goes, but work is always there. The details of Vera’s homemaking, as an Army wife, and of her hotel-managing are set forth almost rhapsodically. Of her childhood we are told, “From her father Verochka learned to laugh, and from her mother to work.” The other story’s heroine, Marya Vladimirovna, describes her mathematical labors: “The solution to the problem was working. I checked the computations once more. It worked. Good God, perhaps it’s for such minutes that life is worth living. I’ve lived a long life and can state authoritatively that nothing—neither love, nor motherhood—nothing in the world yields as much happiness as those minutes.” Her protégé, young Vitaly, discourses for paragraphs on the challenges and nuances of hairdressing and, when beset, proclaims, “I don’t care, because it’s my work that matters to me and only my work.” The seriousness with which work is taken distinguishes these Russian novels from most Western ones, where jobs are usually confined to the wings of the romantic stage and, in a writer like Henry James, reduced to rather comical rumors; in these examples of Soviet fiction, the work, whether that of a biologist, historian, military man, geologist, berry commissioner, or hairdresser, fills up the character and is inextricably involved with his or her personal travails.