Washington Is Halfway to the Moon

By Patricia Blake

A Soviet dissident moves to the U.S. with "baggage in my head"

Avid Russian readers used to strip Soviet bookshops of a new novel by Vasili Aksyonov as if they were stocking up on candles before a storm. A first printing of 100,000 copies would vanish from the stores within 48 hours, and any magazine containing an Aksyonov short story, like his celebrated Halfway to the Moon, could count on the immediate sellout of a 2 million-copy press run. No other prose writer of the post-Stalin generation commanded such an impassioned following; no other offered a more radical departure from the standard Socialist Realist fare. His nonconformity came naturally. Aksyonov had been born an alien in the Soviet world. He was the child of Stalin's victims: his father Pavel, the former Communist mayor of Kazan, served 18 years in the Gulag, and his mother Eugenia Ginzburg wrote two books about her own 18-year ordeal.

The heroes in Aksyonov's books were teen-age runaways who craved rokmuzyka, wore Keds and dzhinsy and talked a nonstop street slang larded with Americanisms, just like real-life Russians. Predictably, Aksyonov's very popularity with the young made him suspect to the Soviet literary Establishment. Yet he remained a member of the Union of Soviet Writers for 18 years.

For the past two years, however, the authorities have systematically expunged Aksyonov's name from the annals of contemporary Russian letters. The reasons were not hard to find. In addition to his writing, he had been attempting to challenge Soviet censorship. His anthology of unorthodox Russian writing, Metropol, was denounced in the Soviet press as salacious and subversive. The Soviet secret police, the KGB, began to hound him in an effort to drive him into exile. In 1980, Aksyonov and his wife Maya succumbed to pressure and left the Soviet Union. His citizenship was then taken away by the Supreme Soviet, and the Literary Gazette announced that he had chosen "the path of betrayal to the motherland."

Vituperation sits lightly on the 50-year-old Russian, who has settled in Washington with his wife. Jaunty, good humored and fit, he jogs four miles almost every morning in the city's parks and around Capitol Hill. Extraordinarily productive, he has confounded every cliche about the predicament of the writer in exile. Although cut off from his natural readers, as well as from the subject matter of his books and the living language of his art, Aksyonov explains in fluent English: "I brought enough baggage with me in my head to last for the rest of my life." Since his emigration, he has written two novels, a film script and several short stories, all in Russian and set in the Soviet Union.

But the backdrop of his work is beginning to include the New World: "I see the vague outlines of a book--a Russian emigre in America harks back to his youth, reflecting on how he began to lose hope." He muses: "My disappointment in my own country has been so bitter. Our generation of writers hoped that after de-Stalinization started in 1956, we might restore Russian literature to its mother, European culture. But since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, there has been no chance of change. Now real writers don't even bother to submit their work to Soviet publishers."

Aksyonov's work has been slow to reach the U.S., where translators have been daunted by the racy, experimental mode he has favored in his recent novels. The Burn, a multilevel masterwork of contemporary Russian fiction, written before his exile but not published in the Soviet Union, will appear in English translation next September under the joint imprint of Houghton Mifflin and Random House. The unusual co-publication by two major, competing firms is the result of a move by Aksyonov's editor, Jonathan Galassi, from one house to the other. Galassi, who is now at Random House, plans to take on the rest of the Russian's still untranslated novels, including The Crimean Island, a satirical fantasy about a tiny free Russian state situated off the coast of the Soviet Union, like a democratic Hong Kong in relation to Communist China.

What does Aksyonov miss that he left behind in the Soviet Union, besides friends and relatives? "Soccer" is the instant reply. "I can't even get most of the World Cup games on TV. But I don't miss Moscow. When I think back on the city, all I see are the nasty faces of apparatchiks and KGB agents." Another grim image springs to his memory. "When I look back on Moscow, I remember the new monument to the Soviet cosmonauts that's been erected in Gagarin Square. It's a sculpture made of steel, 15 stories high, that shows a man becoming a missile, or a missile becoming a man. When I saw the thing silhouetted against the setting sun, that's when I finally decided I had to leave the country." Nowadays, Aksyonov's morning runs in Washington often take him by another monument, the Jefferson Memorial, near the Potomac River. "I'm like a character in one of my stories," he says. "I feel I have jogged halfway to the moon."

--By Patricia Blake

Excerpt

"It was in November 1956, --one evening at the School of Mines in Leningrad, playing in the band of Kostya Rogov. . . In those days 'bourgeois' dances were still forbidden to young people. . . God knows whose stinking head spawned the idea. Surely Stalin himself couldn't have dreamed it up? And then again, perhaps he did. Kostya spat a stream of words at the audience in semi-intelligible slang: 'Kiss my ass! Your Big Daddy's kicked the bucket. Now we're going to play you some jazz.' And we played. But was it just a question of jazz? We longed to be part of the life of the whole world.

----The Burn.

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