Posts Tagged ‘Andrei Platonov’

A letter from Alexander Deriev, husband of the late poet Regina Derieva. The Russian couple have a helluva back story. I wrote about her in “Writ on Water,” an 2014 essay for the Times Literary Supplement here. And I’ve written about her on the Book Haven here and here and here.

She and her husband have a helluva back story. from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city,” according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.

The couple met at the Karaganda black market, while buying books. She was a pianist and the daughter of a KGB higher-up, he is an artist The two shared a love of Andrei Platonov and Truman Capote. They were Russian Jews, then fled to Latvia to convert (bypassing the corrupt Russia Orthodox Church, which has notorious state ties). Then they settled in Israel, before finally relocating to Stockholm, where she is buried after her death in 2013.

Now she has a new book out, Selected Clouds with Bondarenko M. O. , notwithstanding her death a decade ago. Deriev writes:

“Dear Cynthia, on Friday, September 20, Russian troops attacked Odessa again with ballistic missiles. Despite the bombing, the launch of Regina’s Selected Clouds in Odessa’s Literary Museum went well. About 40 or 50 people attended). However, several more presentations of this book will be arranged in other localities soon.” Photographers Stepan Alekyan and Vladimir Bogatyrov documented the event, which included translator Oleksandr Hint, and Kateryna Chernenko, the librarian of Odessa Regional Scientific Library.

The reading continued smoothly as the missiles fired. Grace under pressure.

Postscript: The poet Regina Derieva was also a great collector of seashells – many of them now housed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Alexander recently found one gastropod that bears the name Cynthia. See the attached photos of this shell. Canefriula cynthia (H. C. Fulton, 1902) – 36 mm, Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. He notes: “It is unlikely that the British malacologist, Hugh Coomber Fulton (1861-1942), when naming the newly discovered mollusk, had in mind the verses of Propertius addressed to Cynthia. Most likely, he used the epithet of the Greek goddess Artemis.” I’m flattered.

No principles, just nerves.

A few days ago, all the social media were atwitter with a newly published 1987 interview with Joseph Brodsky.  The piece opened with a comment on his leaving the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972, to protest of the organization’s induction of the Soviet poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko as an honorary member.  Hmmmm???

Nyet!  Something was wrong. A Soviet poet who had already endured KGB interrogations and arrests, a famous trial, and a long stretch to cool his heels in the far North was not  going to be joining elite American literary organizations – not in 1972.  His departure from the organization was in fact in 1987.  I wrote a comment. I got an emailed reply from the beleaguered blogger and journalist, Marcia DeSanctis.  She’s a very experienced and knowledgeable reporter of all things Russian, and suffered a mortifying slip of the pen in the course of tweeking a phrase.  Well, who among us bloggers could not confess to one or two of those?  In fact, I consoled her with the story of a monstrous gaffe of my own that happened the same way, which I’ll save for another time. Unless Richard Kaluzynski outs me first.

A poet, too?

But I gave a closer look to Marcia’s online oeuvre as a result – and I was impressed.

Over the days since, the former ABC news journalist has shared her transcripts and letters from Vladimir Voinovich and Yuz Aleshkovsky from the summer of 1987 over at Tin House.  All three interviews were incorporated in an article she wrote for the The Christian Science Monitor.

Here’s the one with J.B., and it’s got some pretty good stuff:

MD: Then who do you consider the most significant writers in the Russian language?

JB:  The Possessed by Dostoevsky is still the best and most accurate example of the Russian psyche in literature. Platonov is one of the greatest Russian poet, absolutely singular. And Tsvetaeva. These are huge and significant writers. For Russians, Tsvetaeva might be the most important of all. In general, the tenor of Russian literature is consolation – the justification of the existential order on the highest plane of regard. Justification for the Russian nation. Tsvetaeva is a departure from that – her voice doesn’t offer that. She was a writer who regarded reality as unjustifiable – controlled, in a sense, by arbitrary force – the philosophy of discomfort in negative human potential. Her spirit and the spirit of her writing is totally non-orthodox, Calvinist, provides you with discomfort. What distinguishes a writer is the spiritual information the writer offers. Nabokov doesn’t offer that. For all his elegance and precision, he’s a soothing author but Tsvetaeva is of more consequence.

Who knew the author of The Foundation Pit was a poet, too, let alone a great one?  I didn’t.  Either Brodsky misspoke and meant to say prose, or else somebody better get busy with translations.

MD: How important is it to you whether or not you are published in the USSR?

Reality is unjustifiable.

JB: I have no principles, I have only nerves. I’ve never cared very much about what’s happening with my work. I was lucky to have people in Russia interested in me, without having been published. I don’t give a damn whether I am or am not published there. I know that one day, I’ll die and will be published.

I write little poems when I feel like it. Over the years it became my profession. What started out as a deviation became my occupation, and from there came discipline and routine. I trust inertia more than the creative impulse. Stravinsky said, “I do it for myself and my probable alter ego.” I think that every writing career starts as a personal quest for personal betterment. To achieve some kind of sainthood, to make yourself better than you are. You quickly notice that the pen operates more efficiently than the soul. More success as a writer means the loss, somewhat, of the soul. You get on a collision course, and away from your original goal. This results in a terrific personal crisis. Take Gogol, who threw the manuscript of Dead Souls into the fireplace. To bring the work together with the soul as much as possible takes extraordinary effort. It’s no different today than when I was 24.

MD:  You speak English quite well but you write in Russian. Is it problematic as a writer to be exiled from your mother tongue?

JB:   The only problem with writing in Russian is that it matters to hear speech on the streetcar. Those things set you up to find the words in your gut. Elsewhere, you’re bound to become idiosyncratic, hermetic, self-sufficient. You derive pride from being self-reliant. You become an autonomous system, a spacecraft, and it depends on how strong your batteries are. But in the long run, you’re an autonomous entity anyway, one way or another. The less you deceive yourself, the better. Otherwise, the result is a tragic worldview.