Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  As soon as Yelena Bonner married me in 1971, the KGB adopted a sly and cruel plan to solve the “Sakharov problem.” They have tried to shift responsibility for my actions onto her, to destroy her morally and physically. They hope to break and bridle me, while portraying me as the innocent victim of the intrigues of my wife—a “CIA agent,” a “Zionist,” a “mercenary adventuress,” etc.

  The appendix includes extracts from the Soviet news agency TASS, which describe Bonner as a potential “leader of the anti-Soviet scum on the payroll of Western special services,” a “NATO-ized provocateur,” and a basically healthy person who has used the pretense of poor health to travel abroad and profitably engage in “out-and-out anti-Sovietism.” She supposedly motivates her husband’s hunger strikes and would willingly see him dead: “It was Bonner who planted the idea of Sakharov going on a ‘hunger strike’ in order to feed the propaganda organs of the U.S.A. About the health of her spouse she worried least of all, acting on the principle: the worse the better.” Bonner is part Armenian and part Jewish, and anti-Semitism adds to the propaganda campaign against her. An article by Nickolai Yakovlev in a 1983 issue of the widely circulated magazine Man and the Law, entitled “The Firm of E. Bonner and Children,” asserts that “One of the victims of the CIA’s Zionist agents is Academician A. D. Sakharov.… Provocateurs from subversive agencies pushed him and keep pushing this spiritually unbalanced man.… A horrible woman forced herself on the widower Sakharov.” Letters arrive in Gorky advising Sakharov to “divorce the Jewess” and “live by his own mind, not Bonner’s.” In a train compartment, she was once assailed by her fellow passengers: “They shouted things about the war and about Jews.… I kept wishing I had a yellow star to sew onto my dress.”

  She has written this book, her foreword states, “to tell about what has happened during the last three years.… I had to recall and write, not the way things seemed, but the way they were. All this will be of help to Andrei, so I consider it my duty. No one else was with him, and Andrei himself is so efficiently isolated in Gorky that he cannot tell this story.” Much of her intent, then, is to contradict the official Soviet version of their joint ordeal, and to place on the record facts and documents that have otherwise been suppressed. The American reader who has not followed the Sakharov affair closely, and who places no great trust in Soviet press handouts anyway, may find her detailed protestations less interesting than her general picture of what it is like to be a distinguished political prisoner within the Communist system. I was struck by the solemn legality with which vengeful and disciplinary trials are conducted, by the brazen use of medical services as instruments of state intimidation and torture, and by the prodigious amount of manpower expended in surveillance. Not only did teams of KGB men accompany Sakharov and Bonner everywhere they went, leaping in whenever they attempted to pick up a hitchhiker or telephone a television repairman, but her mother’s empty apartment in Moscow warranted round-the-clock guards. “Night and day—they even had a cot so they could rest in shifts.” No one, however, troubled to close a window that had blown open, and when Bonner and her friends tried to make the place briefly habitable again they were forbidden the use of a cleaning service and of a man—any man. Only some female friends of Bonner’s were allowed in to shove the furniture around. A certain prankishness flavors the state’s chastisements. “Whenever the authorities did not like something, it was our car that suffered. Either two tires would be punctured, or a window smashed or smeared with glue.” Sealed envelopes arrived empty at their Gorky residence, and out of one package of scientific reprints “a dozen huge cockroaches scrambled.” In their apartment, books, toothbrushes, glasses, and even dental bridges disappeared and then reappeared: “This whirlwind of moving objects creates a feeling of a Kafkaesque nightmare on the one hand and on the other that you are on a glass slide of a microscope, that you are an experimental subject.”

  The subjects of these particular experiments have not been broken, though both are in fragile health.‡ Bonner admits to a sharp tongue and a hot temper, and describes a number of shouting matches with her guards and judges; we can guess that in any society she would be constructively critical. She was not especially impressed by some of Sakharov’s supporters in the United States: “Almost all are ready to sign something … and yet many know very little. And not only about Sakharov’s problems.” Intellectuals who “talk about nuclear winter, star wars, pollution [and] all the horrors that await mankind” appeared to her paradoxically confident and future-minded in their own prosperous lives. “And they sleep peacefully. They do not notice that they have depressed and ruined the sleep of millions of other people.” For many Americans, her courageous and suffering husband is only “a symbol, a game, politics.” At the White House, she is taken through a back door—“in Russian, we sometimes say a back alley”—and in a small room was received by three people, of whom the greatest, none other than Admiral John Poindexter, reassured her that the administration “was profoundly worried about the fate of my husband and many others, but at the present time it felt that the best way to help them was through quiet, nonpublicized actions.” She expressed disappointment, and explains: “Quiet diplomacy in the defense of human rights is such an old song.… Academician Sakharov considers publicity the main weapon in the struggle for human rights.” She did not see the President, nor did she ask to. But her book includes photographs of herself with Prime Ministers Thatcher and Chirac of England and France, and she writes wryly, “I’m sorry I didn’t see the famous Oval Office, or the garden where the President signed a proclamation declaring Andrei Sakharov Day. I won’t be able to tell Andrei what they look like, but I will certainly describe the backstairs to him.”

  Americans who imagine that just by being their well-intentioned, freedom-loving selves they have won the admiration of persecuted Communist dissidents will be disappointed by Alone Together. A reception at Stanford, even though it included “nice people, delicious hors d’oeuvres, flowers, grandiloquent words, Joan Baez singing about freedom,” displeased Bonner because the university had recently also warmly received Marat Vartanian, who is “implicated as one of the chief figures in the misuse of psychiatry for political purposes.” The organization of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel Peace Prize ten years after her husband did, arouses her ire: “Aren’t some of the people who tortured my husband members?” Her standard of excellence and rectitude is very specific—Andrei Sakharov—and few measure up to it. Her recurring impression that Americans do not very well understand Sakharov’s case, or very much care, is probably accurate. In these last years, even under a conservative administration and in spite of the usual Cold War spy cases and murderous international meddling, there has arisen the sensation that the Soviet Union is not the enemy. Its political religion has fallen flat; free enterprise is creeping in even into its own sluggish system; as a nation, it is soggy with internal problems, and some of them resemble ours. Perhaps radical Islam is the threat, or, from another angle, Japan; but Russia, like a gruff old chess foe who has grown corpulent and distracted over the years, seems an almost comfortable neighbor in the global village. This could change, but for now it seems, to quote Sakharov himself, that “The world is further away from war than it has been in a long time.” War between the two superpowers, that is. And therefore Russia’s internal victims, its silenced and incarcerated writers and artists, its captive refuseniks, its isolated and slandered Sakharovs, are less interesting than formerly to practitioners of quiet diplomacy and to purveyors of our own propaganda.

  Dr. Bonner is independent-minded, and not sentimental even about her own grandchildren, who are American: “Perhaps because Gorky is so distant—not geographically, but distant in other ways—I had pictured them differently. I feel uncomfortable being with them, and a certain … not disappointment, but perhaps disillusionment in not finding what I had expected to find. They are not what I had imagined them to be—not worse and not better, j
ust different. They need a lot of getting used to, but I don’t have that kind of time.” America itself she takes as it comes, making a few scattered observations about the seriousness with which people shop, the size of Los Angeles, the abundance of yachts off Miami. She celebrates her sixty-third birthday at Disney World, and says, “Music is playing somewhere, everything here seems to be carefree, and the flowering trees confuse me—where’s the winter?” While sitting alone on the beach in Miami, she is approached by a twenty-seven-year-old bearded beach bum. They manage to converse, in spite of her imperfect command of spoken English and her growing suspicion that he is stoned, and have this concentrated exchange:

  We spoke about his country and mine. What was good and what was bad. I said, “We don’t have freedom.”

  “We do—to jump in the ocean.”

  So a victim of thought control and totalitarian oppression meets a victim of freedom—one who longs, his implication seems to be, for society to be more watchful and directive. He yearns perhaps for Russia, where there is much less ocean. Bonner does not go out of her way to flatter the United States, nor does she succumb to the commonly intense Russian nostalgia: “I find nostalgia a form of playacting.… I am returning. Why? It’s not that I miss the birches, the beryozkas.… About émigrés. You see many living in difficult circumstances. Our close friends, almost total strangers, and many elderly émigrés—all sometimes speak of their hardships. But there wasn’t one among them who wanted to go back.” She does not look forward to the return; of her previous returns to the Soviet Union, she writes, “As soon as I crossed the border, such a heavy fog, such darkness befell my soul that it is impossible to describe.… It takes incredible willpower to force yourself to learn once again how to breathe without air, swim without water, walk without ground.” She is returning, only, because her husband is there. And he, this book reveals, would leave if he could. Sakharov does not martyristically avoid foreign exile and its lowered profile; when in 1983 the Norwegian government offered him permanent residence, he accepted with gratitude. The Soviet authorities, however, claiming that his mind still holds military secrets from his work on nuclear weaponry twenty years ago, deny him exit.

  Alone Together was written here and there—Newton, Cape Cod, Miami, New York—and moves back and forth between detailed pleading and terse reminiscence, between glimpses of her blithe momentary surroundings and reflections upon her likely fate of continued ostracism and harassment. As the prose goes along, it seems to gather confidence and esprit: “This book wrote itself, without resistance, so easily that these pages probably should not be called a book.” Might we even say it grows more American in style, more breezy and concrete? After all, she was here for five months. One of her last chapters expands upon, in a virtually Thoreauvian manner, the discovery that she wants a house. She has observed that “what Americans want is a house.” Elena Bonner has never had one, always sharing crowded quarters and awkward communal arrangements. “I think that the first time I was mistress of my own place was—it’s hard to believe—in Gorky, in exile. I do not want that. I want a house. My daughter has a house in Newton, Massachusetts. It makes me so happy to think that she has a house.… But it’s time for me to pack my bags.”

  Her heart was repaired here, and this testy, plucky document was left behind as testimony. Bonner returned to Gorky early last June and dropped from the news until recently, when the world was told that General Secretary Gorbachev, personally calling Sakharov on a telephone installed in the physicist’s Gorky apartment just the day before, announced that the couple would be allowed to return to Moscow. This is good news, though mixed with that of another dissenter, Anatoly Marchenko, who has died in Chistopol Prison, and of a psychiatrist, Anatoly Koryagin, who has been imprisoned for protesting the use of psychiatry for political purposes. Talking to The New York Times on his suddenly permissible telephone, Sakharov said he expects to go back to scientific research while continuing to speak out on human rights. His wife, he said, “although she has gotten no worse, is generally a very sick person.… She stays at home because she has a heart condition that does not allow her to go out of the house in this kind of weather.” Back in Moscow, they have endured countless interviews, and Newsweek quotes her as saying that, “if Gorbachev wants to be consistent, then an amnesty for prisoners of conscience is necessary. I also think it is necessary for him to include human rights in the policy of glasnost.” She hoped her husband could visit America, and lamented that “a person with such global thinking has not seen the world, not a single country outside of Russia.” Alone Together was published simultaneously in ten Western countries and, besides making Elena Bonner likable and real to its readers, seems to have done her no harm and perhaps some good. The relatively happy aftermath of its publication bears out her husband’s point that the main weapon in the struggle for human rights is publicity.

  Doubt and Difficulty in Leningrad and Moscow

  PUSHKIN HOUSE, by Andrei Bitov, translated from the Russian by Susan Brownsberger. 371 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

  CHILDREN OF THE ARBAT, by Anatoli Rybakov, translated from the Russian by Harold Shukman. 685 pp. Little, Brown, 1988.

  Glasnost, like the sun breaking through, brings shadows. More, clearly, is to be permitted in the Soviet Union, but how much more? Doctor Zhivago can now be published, as being not sufficiently injurious to the health of the Revolution, and so can a smattering of formerly scorned émigrés such as Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov. And not only Nabokov’s chess problems, his youthful translation of Alice in Wonderland, and his little book on Gogol have been published but two novels with a strong taint of political content—The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading—have been judged fit to print in the nervous homeland of their language. Who, a few short years ago, would have thought it?

  Two ambitious novels by Soviet citizens have been recently translated into English and published here after suffering misadventures on the way to their local printer’s. Pushkin House, by Andrei Bitov, was written in the mid-Seventies, circulated in samizdat, was published in Russian by Ardis Publishers, in Michigan, and last year achieved publication in the Soviet Union. Children of the Arbat, by Anatoli Rybakov, was suppressed for twenty years before, in “one of the most daring steps of glasnost” (to quote the words of Yevgeny Yevtushenko on the back of the jacket), it was published in the U.S.S.R., “where public libraries have a readers’ waiting list for it in the thousands.” The jacket of Pushkin House, too, bears an encomium: Vassily Aksyonov writes, “Although Pushkin House has not been published in the Soviet Union as of yet, this novel has stood up for ten years as a firm part of the contemporary Russian artistic and intellectual environment. Andrei Bitov belongs to the St. Petersburg–Leningrad School of Prose with its ambitions to inherit the perfection of the Silver Age.” On the other hand, Yevtushenko tells us, “Children of the Arbat is written in the tradition of the Russian social novel of the nineteenth century. It is a geological cross section of terra incognita revealing all the layers of society of the early 1930s in Moscow.” The symmetry of the blurbists is striking: Yevtushenko is the most internationally conspicuous of those now-middle-aged writers who blossomed during Khrushchev’s brief cultural thaw twenty-five years ago and have since elected to tough it out as Soviet artists; Aksyonov, his former confrere and almost exact contemporary, is the best-known child of the thaw to immigrate to the United States, and now resides, jogs, and gives interviews in Washington, D.C. Their respective endorsements suggest that Rybakov’s novel is that of an insider (“One of Russia’s most successful writers,” the back flap tells us) working close to the edge, and Bitov’s that of an outsider (though five books of his short stories were published in Moscow between 1963 and 1972) who would rather not think about the edge. Suddenly allowed, last year, to appear at a Washington conference on Western literature, Bitov—a tall, rather sedate man with thinning hair and a drooping, graying mustache—said of the new climate under Gorbachev, “Personally, I am tired o
f all the changes taking place because I no longer have time to sleep.… Change, even for the better, causes discomfort.”

  Pushkin House is a brilliant, restless, impudent novel, reminiscent of The Gift in that it refracts a sensitive young man’s moral and aesthetic progress through a prism of allusions to earlier Russian literature, and of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg in that it makes the city now called Leningrad a vivid and symbolically freighted presence and swathes a few hectic domestic events in a giddy whirl of metaphorically packed language. All three of these novels feel, to the American reader, as if they were losing a lot in translation. The Silver Age mentioned by Aksyonov has no exact equivalent in English prose; its peculiar shades of purple and playfulness and its close alliance with Symbolist poetry suggest distinctly minor writers like Ronald Firbank and Edgar Saltus, while there is nothing minor, in Russian, about Bely and Nabokov. Perhaps Nabokov’s English-language novels Pale Fire and Ada and the more philosophically expansive Saul Bellow works like Henderson the Rain King and Humboldt’s Gift better suggest the controlled explosions, the high-energy conflux of poetic language and way-out thought, that the Russian tradition generated before Lenin and Stalin shut it down. Pushkin House is a literary institute and museum in Leningrad, and in a broader sense the house of which Pushkin laid the cornerstone—classic Russian literature. Epigraphs from and allusions to (attentively footnoted by the translator) this literature abound in Bitov’s text, whose three sections bear titles taken from four masterpieces: “Fathers and Sons” (Turgenev), “A Hero of Our Time” (Lermontov), and “The Humble Horseman” (combining Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” and Dostoevsky’s Humble Folk, a combination reversed in the epilogue as “Bronze Folk”). There is also some pointed, mischievous parallelism with Chernyshevsky’s seminal radical novel What Is to Be Done? It would no doubt help us to have read all these works, as even the mildly educated Russian reader has, but perhaps we can get the idea anyway—the idea, that is, of the superfluous man, the gentleman who floats above the depths of Russian society, and whose existence is especially problematical for literature, since in his superfluity he is nevertheless the principal bearer of culture.