An Alphabet of Faces: An Evening at the Russian Samovar

A lovely evening at the Russian Samovar -- a reading by Russian author and entrepreneur Dmitry Birman of Nizhny Novgorod and a book party for the release of the English translation of his book The Alphabet of Masks, translated by Antonina Bouis.

First, the cold zakuski -- but this included cooked-to-perfection Beef Stroganoff and grechka (buckwheat) and some sort of red vodka -- was it raspberry?

Some table conversation, where the conversation naturally turned to Skolkovo, as it does whenever there is "Russia" and "business" in the room -- because this is supposed to be the new Silicon Valley of Russia.

The verdict:

o a Russian businessman who travels back and forth frequently between the two countries says it is a bust -- no real money there, and of course it's hard to have "command innovation" organized from the top by the Kremlin -- he pointed out that business incentives that American cities give with tax breaks  work better for this -- and of course, intellectual freedom.

o a former U.S. official didn't think much of it -- and said "there's  no new money there" when I kept objecting, "But I thought Intel gave a billion...or was it IBM...didn't they all give millions at the time of the summit". "No new money" is something that happens often in the world of aid...the government or a company was going to give it anyway, and it had already been budgeted, and when they have to announce something suddenly in connection with some event, they'll say "We're giving X..." as if it appeared suddenly -- although of course money seldom does.

Despite all this, I think probably there are some startupshchiki that will get a piece of cash from the Russian government (remember Anna Chapman?!) and some Americans will get wrapped up in it and have a stake in making it seem like it's something...

Now for the book reading -- Birman writes short stories that are punchy and a bit sentimental but not so long as to become lachrymose -- and some of them take a strange bitter turn making them memorable. Like the story of the carrot-topped freckle-faced draftee who is Jewish, yet finds on his draft exemption card, his "nationality" (as ethnicity is called in Russia) says "Russian" instead of "Jewish". It was a matter of pride. So he goes back again to the colourful Gogol-like characters at the military board, the fat sergeant with the greasy face and the post-prandial nap and the fly atop his nose -- and gets a secretary to re-type it -- only to find the mistake is made again. When he comes back for the second time, they bellow, "You're going to Kandahar!"He doesn't. He goes to medical school, but falls in love with a Komsomol girl who herself goes to Afghanistan...

So he accompanies her to work as a surgeon as they fulfill their "international duty," then there's a shelling, then there's his wife dying in combat and he accompanies the infamous "gruz-200" ("Freight 200" or a zinc casket of a Soviet soldier killed "fulfilling his international duty"). The soldier later drinks, but then re-marries, settles down, and one day reaches into his suitcase and finds his old draft card...

The suitcase in the attic is in fact a real one that Dmitry recalls his father had with a hidden book of Viktor Nekrasov's, which he treasured. A suitcase that had to be kept in the attic because of the crowded kommunalka...

Dmitry also read some of his poems -- these had been translated by Bella Shayevich and I marveled once again how people turn Russian poetry into English poetry.

I never take on poetry, and leave it to the far more competent Jamey Gambrell -- and we were horrified that Jamey took such a beating in the Times this last weekend. Steve Kotkin felt she had messed up the meaning of oprichniki. I'd like to see the full text, but I don't see in fact what was wrong with saying they worked for the government  or did "government work" -- because indeed they were like henchmen, they were the political police, the predecessors of the NKVD. Yes, Kotkin is right about zemshchina versus zemstvo -- but when Soviet dissident writers talked about the oprichina, and used the term about the KGB in their era, they meant the government's political police doing the Soviet state's dirty work. They didn't mean any of the historical sense of "working against the sovereign" -- that makes no sense.

I remember first coming across the modern use of the word in samizdat written by Viktor Nekipelov, author of Institute of Fools, the poet put in a psychiatric hospital, in 1978. He, too, died in exile, in France, in 1987.

Argghhhh the awful lot of a translator...always slaving and suborning one's personal wishes to the author and always being seen but not heard, and poor Jamey, after so much excellent work, to get a slam in the high profile Times -- and not a thing you can do about it...

I don't like the undertone Kotkin takes of a hint of scorn toward writers who wrote in the Soviet era and were dissidents and then somehow seem to be "ne u del" and superfluous and out of touch or pointless after the coup. Well, no. I actually don't think they were ever superflous. Because memory fades, and all the awful practices started coming back. And it's okay to write about the dissidents and the resistance to Soviet totalitarianism because the memories are gone.

We're 58 years from the death of Stalin and 74 years from the fateful 1937, and who will believe that it was so terrible when all the old folks are gone?!

During the question and answer period, Birman didn't seem to get any queries about writing, but rather about life in Russia these days, then more about what it was like to run a business in the hinterlands of Nizhny Novgorod, which I think is something like 250 miles from Moscow (a hard drive I went on once with a film crew in 1991).

Someone asked how many Jews there were in Nizhny Novgorod, which has a population of about 1 million people. Answer: about 15,000. That's because it was "beyond the pale of settlement" and that's where the Tsar banished the Jews.

Birman has been part of a renaissance of Jewish life in Nizhny, which is reviving after the years of atheism and suppression of "nationalities" under Soviet rule. He has sponsored a kosher restaurant and said he and his daughter (who was present) attend a synagogue.

I asked if the conversion from the Soviet military-industrial complex that Nizhny once was a big part of, to civilian manufacturing, ever took place. At the time when I was there filming with a CBC crew 20 years ago, we were taken to a demonstration tea pot factory that was supposedly a converted tank plant. We were somewhat skeptical.

Birman said, "No" -- and it turned out it was because the Chinese could make and sell in Russia such things as tea kettles much more efficiently and cheaply. Even so, armaments were still made there, and still sold, to places like Iraq.

Back in 1991, just after the coup, we were less than convinced, and wouldn't put this bit of propaganda into the film.

Perhaps because of our skepticism, in the middle of the night, suddenly there was a knock at the door. A man was standing outside, bearing a teapot.

"Would you like to drink some tea?!" he leered at me.

Somehow, with that instinct you acquired from years of being followed by the KGB in that place, I knew that the guy wasn't just a friendly neighbour or trying to pick up a foreigner lady, or drunk, but was trying to prove a point about the tea pots -- in the most creepy of ways. He seemed perfectly sober. I slammed the door, and called downstairs to the front desk.

"There's a man here bothering me with a tea pot!" I spluttered to the surprised dezhurnaya.

"Yedem," she said firmly, "On my way," with that female solidarity that even a Soviet dezhurnaya can feel for an Amerikanskaya shpionka.

Within minutes, she and a sleepy porter had materialized in the hallway, and the three of us looked in vain for Tea Pot man down the stair well -- he was nowhere to be found.

We all went our ways, but within a few minutes, there it was again, the man knocking on the door. I called again. Once again that "yedem!" I'll never forget -- iron maiden Soviet determination. And this time, the woman on duty was back with a middle-aged man in a shiny blue Soviet suit, of indeterminate affiliation, who began knocking on the other doors. I shrank back into my room and lay on my pallet, trying to get some sleep, with the knocking, knocking persisting later into the night.

For some reason, a guy in our film crew kept saying, "Maybe he just really wanted to drink tea..."

I'll never forget visiting a fabulous chicken place -- a new Soviet fast food restaurant never tried before. Delicious. But the manager had many woes -- it was hard to get the potatoes, the chicken fryers, the utensils -- the farms weren't exactly independent, if they sold all the chicken to him for his restaurant, because he was willing to pay more, the stores waiting for their quotas complained, there were shortages.

A very young Boris Nemtsov, the youngest gubernator of Nizhegorodskaya oblast, spent a lot of time he'd rather have spent reforming the system having to essentially go and make sure all these complaining entitlement constituents were kept happy. This union, that school, the other factory...

One day we accompanied him to a hospital, where he distributed bags of candies to the sick children. The bags of candy were huge. It was odd. The children were kept in glassed-in isolation wards.

Then there was one of the times when we got to see from start to finish the Soviet distribution system, getting up at 0:dark30  -- the grim bread factory, where people got part of their pay in the form of heavy, brown sour loaves of Soviet bread...the trucks loading to take the bread to various numbered stores without names...the queues forming to try to get the better breads before they sold out. The struggling effort to manufacture more ovens so that more bread could be made at more locations, but parts missing and breakdowns. It was very hard to change the Soviet system...

The town was still draped with Lenin pictures and Soviet slogans that had already started to disappear from Moscow and Leningrad by that time, so we dubbed it "the land that time forgot".

Dmitry inscribed in my copy of his book in Russian that I should come visit Nizhny, because things have really changed in 20 years -- and I imagine indeed they have!

After his talk, his publisher, Robert from Enigma Books, set up a table to sell the books, and a line formed. This crowd of a few dozen people was definitely the reading sort -- imagine, waiting in line to get a book in our time!

Someone asked Dmitry whether he had a blog -- he said he wrote some of his poetry on his cell phone in the form of text messages because he was busy, and it was easy that way, but no, not a blog as such. He said he had a Facebook page.

Somebody asked the crowd -- which had people from ages to 17 to 70 -- who was on Facebook. About a quarter of the hands went up.

Then I was moved to ask who was on Twitter.

Not a soul raised their hand.

The teenage girls giggled and said it was stupid and they didn't like it. Somebody else said the usual thing about how they didn't like writing -- or reading -- about what was for lunch.

NOW it was time for the pelmeni -- Nina, the translator, had promised us if we were good and patient through the reading, they were coming as "the hot" course.

There are probably few things better than the Samovar's pelmeni. They are boiled in a succulent spicy juice to perfection and Nina says you should have them with smetana, sour cream (they are sort of Russian raviolis with more meat).

I prefer having them with gorchitsa, which is this Russian hot mustard. Not many people have them like that, but for some reason my mother-in-law often puts them out with gorchitsa.

And that of course reminds me of another literary journey -- well, actually, not literary for me, because I was merely a factotum. I went once to Peredelkino to visit the famous Anatoly Rybakov, author of Children of the Arbat and many other works, who became known in the West as well as a perestroika author. Peredelkino was a kind of Soviet writer's village -- a country area of pine forests and wooden dachas outside of Moscow where the elite made their summer -- and sometimes year-round -- homes.

I forget exactly the errand I was on -- it was some sort of po okazii sort of thing where I was perhaps bringing or picking up a manuscript or likely it was bringing some copies of the English edition of the published book, possibly for Nina, who was his translator, or something like that.

Of course when I arrived, even being a stranger on an errand, I was invited in to sit down for lunch and to have a chat. I remember we talked about what was coming out in the newspapers. It was one of those glasnost-era conversations. "Oh! there's this!" and "Oh, did you see that!" Rybakov talked about his book and I said I had been on the Arbat and how it was changed now (a kind of tourist trap, although I bought some nice batiks there which I still have).

Rybakov's wife, Tanya, served some pelmeni. And here I was, with this great man, with this great literay occasion, where I could have asked about the meaning of life from this long-suffering and great writer, but being a boorish American, I just had to ask:

"Do you have any gorchitsa?"  Because it wasn't on the table.

Rybakov and his wife were flung into distress. Gorchitsa! No, they didn't think so! Couldn't I just make do with the smetana?!

Tanya began poking around in the cupboards, climbing up on chairs, rooting around on shelves.

I should have been more chagrined, but I waited patiently. I knew this was going to be very good gorchitsa.

Finally, Tanya appeared back on the porch, triumphant, with a small half-finished bottle of gorchitsa. I was thrilled. We were all thrilled. Russians are such kind hosts. I slathered it on my pelmeni, and boy, was it spicy but I perservered. She insisted that I take it with me.The year was about 1989 or 1990 I think -- Rybakov died in 1998.

Nekrasov died in 1987 -- I remember meeting him once at some emigre literary function, and I recall writing a protest letter about the Soviet stripping of his citizenship in 1979 when I worked at Freedom House.

A writer like Birman, even if not so well known and not at the level of a Mandelshtam is a kind of heir to these writers in spirit if not necessarily in style -- Birman said he also remembered the years Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel peace prize laureate and physicist, was exiled to Gorky (later restored to the name of Nizhny Novgorod). In 1991, we visited the apartment where Sakharov lived with his wife, Elena Bonner -- it was a modest Soviet apartment and it seemed shocking to think of a great man struggling to write his memoirs in this setting -- and the KGB hounding him and stealing his briefcase.

Another round of pelmeni -- the gorchitsa at Samovar isn't very spicy, but it's probably out of deference to the foreigners (i.e. the Americans) -- and some more reminiscing. Someone said that when they gave a lecture at MGU a few weeks ago, he found the students didn't know their own dissident history. I said I had discovered that myself once, giving a talk at the university and staring at the bust of Lenin still there, and finding that people didn't know about the dissidents like Pavel Litvinov who had gone out on Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hell, they didn't even know about the invasion of Czechoslovakia...

Comments

[rkka]

"I said I had discovered that myself once, giving a talk at the university and staring at the bust of Lenin still there, and finding that people didn't know about the dissidents like Pavel Litvinov who had gone out on Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hell, they didn't even know about the invasion of Czechoslovakia."

Why should they remember the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when the invasion of Iraq provides a much more recent example of; a Great Power bullying a small country, a conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and was far bloodier to boot?

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

It's possible to condemn both invasions, you know "rkka"?

And I'd like to hear your plan for the numerous terrorists that have killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq.

Most of the civilians killed in Iraq are killed by terrorists and militants of various sort in that region, some backed by theocratic states like Iran, and by Al Qaeda.

They aren't killed by American troops.

Where's your condemnation for that, eh?

You suffer from the usual myopia, imagining the worst crimes are America's and even -- Orwellian all the way! -- advocating that people should forget all other wars, and only focus on this one -- really, the first part of this one. Great power bullying? Not as simple as that. Where was your condemnation of Saddam, and where is your condemnation of Iran, Syria, and the terrorists? You imagine they wouldn't exist if the US went away?

[rkka]

"And I'd like to hear your plan for the numerous terrorists that have killed tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq."

Absolutely. They're scum, no question.

And how many Iraqis were being killed by AQ terrorists prior to March 2003?

Saddam was a bloody dictator who opposed AQ.

President Dumbya Bush made Iraq into an AQ playground.

And Syria and Iran are pikers when it comes to lying their way into idiotic wars, compared to the US of A.