Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  I. Grekova’s interest in the details of work exposes, without any editorial flavor of defensiveness or indignation, the exact workings of privilege and corruption within the system. In “Ladies’ Hairdresser,” we see how line-hopping occurs in beauty parlors (“I was ashamed of my privileges,” the computer director confesses, “and my heart was on the side of those who shouted and got upset, but my body took its out-of-turn place in that chair”) and just how labor officials skim graft from the government’s allowances for tool depreciation. In “The Hotel Manager,” we are given instruction on not only how to juggle the hostelry regulations but how the black market in goods and services arises and perpetuates itself in an atmosphere of benevolence:

  On the surface, all kinds of goods did not exist. But in the depths, they were circulating and could be called up by something resembling sorcery.… One had to go through sacred rituals of camaraderie, to engage in (almost sincere) declarations of mutual love, when a matter was being settled not in return for a favor or, God forbid, a large sum of money, but simply out of love for one’s neighbor.… The businessmen of the secret world needed to believe in their selflessness. And to believe it one had to drown oneself in vodka.

  The government is not criticized; it scarcely seems to exist, except as a superfluity of regulations and excuses for inertia. Vera, in her capacity as manager, thinks to herself, “If only she had more freedom to act!” Yevtushenko’s yea-saying novel includes a curious document, half obliterated by water and eventually tossed into the fire, which contains among its “Thoughts on Order and Disorder” the apothegm “We have to help the government relax a bit.” In Trifonov’s miasmic world, the murk thickens at the top, whence something sinister emanates, blocking upward movement. Sergei’s balked dissertation concerned the Czar’s secret police, and though the novel never states it, most of its readers could be assumed to know the legend that the young Stalin was, for a time, an agent for this perfidious force. Such dark allusions seem mere muttering, however, compared with I. Grekova’s candid, matter-of-fact glimpses into the Soviet system’s imperfect workings. A professorial bigwig herself, she knows something of how power flows under Communism, and also sees where the system cannot reach and perennial human happiness and misery take their course.

  Like Trifonov’s characteristic work, the longer of I. Grekova’s two fictions contains a great deal of flashback and summary. After the death of Vera’s loving bully of a husband, “The Hotel Manager” runs rather low on suspense, in part because the heroine is unremittingly brave, sunny, and resourceful. Her husband was her only flaw, and though partings and deaths darken her path, it is all natural process, and every loss is redeemed by a gain in freedom. There are too many startlingly real and tender touches (“the rainbow eyelashes of the streetlamps,” “the child’s pillow which smelled of almond soap”) for us to doubt the reality of what we read, but we read on because we care about Vera, and we care about her because the writer so infectiously loves her, with her happy nature, her wide-hipped health, her ability to nurture and improvise. After all lip service has been rendered to the socialist ideals of rational planning and mutual criticism, self-heedless energy is dearest to the Russian heart. Vera, at the age of sixty, does not look long in the mirror. “No use looking and pulling,” her friend Margarita tells her. “Self-criticism for a woman is death. I have never suffered from that.”

  Twenty years ago, when this reviewer visited Russia, Vassily Aksyonov was to prose fiction what Yevtushenko and Voznesenky were to poetry—young, daring, a rallying point for those Soviet citizens who craved freedom in the arts. Aksyonov had become famous with a novella, Ticket to the Stars (1961), that portrayed Western-influenced urban youths, stilyagi, in their authentic idiom and mood. In the decades since, while Yevtushenko adjusted to the post-thaw refreeze that followed Khrushchev’s ouster, Aksyonov—a prodigiously productive writer, for the stage and screen as well as the printed page—increasingly clashed with the authorities. He was a moving spirit in the creation of a literary anthology, Metropol, which, when published in 1979 in a tiny edition of one, defied official censorship; when two of his fellow editors were expelled from the country, Aksyonov resigned from the Writers’ Union, and when, in 1980, his domestically unpublishable novel The Burn was published in Italy he was himself forced to emigrate.

  The Island of Crimea was written within Russia in 1977–79 and published in its original language by the late Karl Proffer’s Ardis Publications in 1981. It is a prodigious, overpopulated, futuristic fantasy based upon the premise of an island—rather than the actual peninsula—of Crimea that was successfully defended against the Red Armies by the Whites in 1920 and that thereafter developed, somewhat in the manner of Taiwan, into a thriving capitalist democracy, with skyscrapers, superhighways, packed supermarkets and luxury shops, sports-car rallies, a Yalta beachfront full of sunbathing girls in minimal bikinis, a theme park of artificial mountains, ubiquitous and untrammelled news media, and a multitude of competing political parties. At the time of our story—“late in the present decade or early in the decade to come (depending on when this book comes out)”—our hero, fabulously rich and handsome forty-six-year-old Andrei Arsenievich Luchnikov, son of Arseny Nikolaevich, one of the White Army founders of the Crimean nation, and father of Anton Andreevich, a vagabond saxophonist, has decided in his middle-generation unease to lead, from the podium of his Simferopol newspaper the Russian Courier, a campaign for Crimea’s restoration of itself to the Soviet Union, democratic institutions, material prosperity, and all.

  Why Luchnikov would want to do this dreadful thing, and why his movement (called the Common Fate League, or SOS) eventually captivates ninety percent of the voting Crimeans, forms the novel’s central mystery and problem. A Westerner, clearly, is reading this book from the wrong end. For all its explosive inventiveness and muffled passion, The Island of Crimea seems strained, stretched-out, and emotionally opaque. As I read it, I was awkwardly conscious of allusions I was missing, from puns and pointed caricatures on up to the entire ambience, the bias of the satire. The novel, Pynchonesque in its gag names, multiplying conspiracies, and mechanical interconnections, wears an unremitting grimace; but what is being grimaced at? Crimea as an epitome of Western enterprise and decadence is plausible enough; Aksyonov has done his travelling, including a visiting lectureship at U.C.L.A. in 1975. He has also read his Ian Fleming, and the Bond tales are evoked specifically at least three times and generally in the souped-up environment of fast cars, underground cloverleafs, wigwam-shaped glass penthouses, instantly compliant young women, and armadas of bad guys. Yet satire of the West’s “hysterical materialism” is not the point; the author clearly loves the idea of Crimea, “the idea of a miniature, tinselly Russia” and its “carnival of freedom.” The novel’s heroine, Tatyana, whose demanding roles include those of television broadcaster, Soviet sports hero’s wife, Luchnikov’s mistress, KGB spy, and Yalta hooker, does entertain some dire thoughts about “the capitalist jungle where the very air is pornographic” and yearns to get back from Crimea to “a world where you can’t get anything you need and everybody’s afraid of everything, the real world.” But the island of capitalist unreality, a festive blend of southern California, Hong Kong, and Oz, inspires affection in most everybody, including Soviet officialdom. For this novel to have earned its breadth and complexity, one convinced Communist should have been represented; but all the Soviets are cheerful thugs or secret Crimeans, as baffled by Luchnikov’s betrayal of his homeland as the reader is. Kuzenkov, a Kremlin higher-up, calls the Common Fate League “that sadomasochistic Idea, that snobbish guilt gone berserk!”

  Some clues to “Looch” ’s state of mind are offered. When visits by Crimeans to the motherland became possible, “a few of them did try to understand and immerse themselves in Soviet life, and the first was Andryushka Luchnikov.” Many visits later, arriving from Paris, he still immerses himself:

  After the first glass of vodka the atmosphere changed completely. Mosc
ow comfort. He never could quite understand how it worked. Here you were, primed to feel the prying eye of the KGB on your back, aware of the most heinous form of lawlessness going on all around you, and suddenly you were in bliss.… Even here in the lower reaches of notorious Gorky Street—where a look out the window gave you an unobstructed view of the stone giants of Stalinist decadence—even here after the first swallow of vodka you immediately forgot your Paris night fever and sank into it ecstatically: Moscow comfort. It was like the old family nurse massaging their heads.

  He seeks out the shabby back streets that give him “a deceptive sense of the normalcy, sanity, sagacity of Russian life.” After a three-day binge in the city, “he had lost so much weight that his jacket hung on him as if on a hanger. He felt great pity for the poor lost Moscow souls he met; he identified with them wholly. He was quite fond of himself as he was now: thin and full of pity.” Hiding in the remote countryside, in the company of “foul-mouthed peasants,” Luchnikov goes down on his knees in the mud and makes “a large, slow cross.” Crosses multiply as the book heaves toward its apocalyptic end, and like a refugee from farthest Dostoevsky Luchnikov preaches to a crowd of Crimeans about his proposed “daring yet noble attempt to share the fate of two hundred and fifty million of our brethren who, through decades of gloom and untold suffering, relieved by only an occasional glimmer of hope, have carried on the unique moral and mystic mission of Mother Russia and the nations that have chosen to follow her path.” This is not so much the voice of Luchnikov as a voice within him. His other voice says to Russia, “Your economy’s falling apart, your politics are a pack of lies, your ideology’s at a dead end.” Luchnikov’s contradictions and disagreeable slipperiness stem, I think, from his embodiment of ambiguity, of the ambiguous feelings of the author, who while writing this work was ever more imminently facing the prospect of exile.

  “He was prepared for one vast bomb site, the smoky remains of a series of trumped-up trials and expulsions.… Instead he found an uncanny gaiety: loft parties all over town, amateur theatricals in private flats, concerts at scientific institutes and outlying clubs … poetry readings by the young and struggling, meetings of the Metropol group, all-night philosophy discussions over tea, samizdat discoveries, basement exhibits.…” Luchnikov, arriving from Crimea, is the vehicle of perception but the world perceived is Aksyonov’s, down to the Metropol group—the vital, busy, “semiunderground” world of Moscow artists. “He was amazed to find so many new deviations from the ideal citizen.… Yet here they were, living proof that life went on.” This is Russia as the working writer experiences it, a mixed bag but alive and actual. Luchnikov’s scheme of reintegrating Crimea with the U.S.S.R. makes sense only as a metaphor for Aksyonov’s wish to remain part of a nation that is inexorably rejecting him. He will lose his language, his cultural frame of reference, and the audience that understands his frame of reference; and Russia will lose one more bright spirit. Without knowing it, Russia needs him. The dissident has not only a desire but a duty to stay. In The Island of Crimea, Vitaly Gangut, the film director, who seems closer to being the author’s alter ego than the playboy magnate Luchnikov, knows that “even the ever so slightly nonconformist film at home was worth more to the cause than ten or twenty Paris-based dissident journals,” and Dim Shebeko, the jazz-rock bandleader, has refused offers from America because “Russia needs Russians playing here in Russia.” And, it is true, figures like Solzhenitsyn and Sinyavsky, as long as they stayed in the Soviet Union, were heroes on a global scale; outside it, they became just a few additional decibels in the West’s cacophonous Tower of Babel.

  I have never met a Russian, here or there, loyal functionary or indignant expatriate, who did not think Russia was the most interesting subject in the world. On the lip of the Grand Canyon, in the midst of Manhattan, they will wrap themselves in Russianness, and take in nothing. In Paris, Luchnikov, seeing newspaper headlines about cosmonauts and Sakharov, thinks proudly, “Yet one way or another, Russia—decayed, demoralized Russia—continued to give the world its headlines.” Baxter, a rich American, is made to complain, “The only thing anybody talks about any more is the goddamn Russian question.” “I want to be Russian, and I don’t care if they send us to Siberia,” Luchnikov cries. A reflexive chauvinism is part of the Russian genius; the land, the language, and (in a non-political sense) the way of life imprint themselves indelibly. All four of these books, with their differing tones and degrees of persuasiveness, take warmth from the rub between Russian self-love and Russian reservations, stated or implied, about the presiding system. Yet, indisputably, the distrusted if not loathed system has sprung from the cherished land, and is part of it. The Island of Crimea’s Kuzenkov, the most sophisticated and sympathetic of Soviet officials, confronted with a snide opinion of Stalin, reflects that “only someone completely foreign to our way of life … would deal so basely with our history, with a man whose name for generations of Soviets has meant victory, order, power. And if it has meant violence and even obscurantism as well, then at least they were majestic and grandiose.”

  People will always hearken to any system that offers to give suffering a meaning, even at the cost of deepening that suffering. Luchnikov, bored and depressed in his tinselly little capitalist paradise, likes himself thin and full of pity, and longs for Siberia, if that is what it takes to give his soul value. And a sense of immaterial value, of life as intrinsically vicissitudinous but worth suffering, animates all these instances of fiction; there is nothing in them, even in Trifonov at his weariest, of a death wish, of any cultural equivalent to Werther’s widely imitated suicide or the skulls that bloomed generations later on the caps of the SS. A life-loving trait, rather, informs the resilient characters of Soviet fiction, even where, as in Wild Berries, their presentation seems coarse or ingenuous; this same trait, it may not be too fanciful to extrapolate, has helped make the Soviets, for these forty years of ragged truce, tolerable partners in power.

  Russian Delinquents

  NOVEL WITH COCAINE, by M. Ageyev, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim. 204 pp. Dutton, 1984.

  KANGAROO, by Yuz Aleshkovsky, translated from the Russian by Tamara Glenny. 278 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.

  The possibility has been raised, by the Russian émigré scholar N. A. Struve, that Novel with Cocaine, by M. Ageyev (a pseudonym), is in truth by the late Vladimir Nabokov. The novel takes its youthful hero, Vadim Maslennikov, up to 1919, the year Nabokov left Russia; both Vadim and Vladimir were born in 1899; and, according to Mr. Struve, M. Ageyev’s only other known prose work, a short story entitled “A Rotten People,” appeared in an émigré magazine, Vstrechi, to which Nabokov had promised—but never, it seems, delivered—material. Novel with Cocaine first manifested itself as an unsolicited manuscript sent from Istanbul to the Paris-based journal Chisla; it was serially published there, in part, and then issued as a book in 1936. Contemporary reviewers found it rather thrillingly decadent, and even pornographic, but its author’s attempts to emigrate to Paris on the strength of its succès de scandale came to nothing. “Ageyev” vanished.† In 1983, his novel was published in French to such high praise as “Mr. Ageyev is a genius” (Le Point), “A book in the league of Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (Temps Économie Littéraire), and “Mr. Ageyev has thrown his life into this novel. Finally, he is rewarded by immortality” (Vendredi-Samedi-Dimanche). Novel with Cocaine has its merits and becomes fascinating in its second half, but I very much doubt that Nabokov wrote it.

  On the practical level, Nabokov after 1960 used the luxuries of leisure and attention won for him by his best-selling Lolita to supervise, lovingly and pedantically, the English translation of his youthful Russian-language works, and there seems no reason, when even his old chess problems were sifted and selectively preserved, that such a large and significant souvenir as this novel would be ignored. Further, what Nabokov himself neglected to collect (such as his academic lectures and a number of plays), his esta
te, under the guidance of his widow and son, has been bringing into print. The Nabokovs steadfastly disown Ageyev and his work.

  On the literary level, the novel is intensely, derivatively Dostoevskian; yet Nabokov loathed Dostoevsky. Vadim Maslennikov can’t stop craving humiliation and demonstrating human perversity. Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, he hops about absurdly from mood to anti-mood: “Thus, taking a clean shirt from the wardrobe, the only silk shirt I owned, I threw it to the floor after a cursory inspection—the shoulder seam had begun to come undone—and trampled it underfoot as if I had a dozen of them. When I cut myself shaving, I continued to scrape the razor over the gash, pretending I could not feel it in the least.… After a sip of coffee I pushed my cup aside like a spoiled brat, though the coffee was perfectly good and I wanted to go on drinking it.” His own behavior constantly takes him by surprise: “But when, inwardly composed and wishing to say something trivial, I again raised my head, I surprised myself by leaping out of my chair instead.” He is morbid and self-destructive and vortically introspective, whereas the young heroes of early Nabokov novels like Mary and Glory are characterized by a certain robust innocence, a healthy willingness to be enraptured by the world. On the stylistic level, Ageyev does now and then strike off images reminiscent of Nabokov’s eccentric precision: a man is observed “cleaning the door handle with whiting, his free hand following the same pattern as the hand that was doing the work,” and we see a “circus poster of a beauty in tights leaping through a torn hoop, her peach-colored thigh pierced by the nail holding the poster in place.” The hero specifies, “I would stand at the window for long periods of time, a cigarette in the catapult of my fingers, and try to count—through the deep-blue smoke from the tangerine tip and the filthy gray smoke from the cardboard filter—the number of bricks in the neighboring wall.” But such hyperrealism (the “catapult” of the posed fingers, the two shades of cigarette smoke) could be learned from Bely and the Symbolists. Ageyev often overdoes it: