by Robert Carr
Is that what’s happening now, with your father’s journals?
LAUKHIN
No. Preparing the journals, I am the one that writes with my father, not the other way around.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a difference?
LAUKHIN
Of course, a huge one. In the forthcoming journal, he’s the main writer. In Conversations I was the main writer.
A lot was left unsaid in Conversations, or hidden between the lines and behind the Aesopian language we perfected in the Soviet Union. I learned from Ehrenburg’s People, Life, Years what would go through and what would not, and it still wasn’t easy. I made the tour of literary magazines and publishing houses with it. It was a lengthy process, almost two years, and I’ll skip the endless discussions and equivocations, and the questionings of my intentions. I heard the usual cant—the book was too pessimistic, inimical to our people and the revolution’s aims. What riled them above all was the pessimism. I argued it was a book about the last years of a sick man. They asked why did I have to write about such things? I said I wanted to write about my father. Didn’t I have happier things to write about him? Couldn’t I remember him as a healthy man? They objected to the detailed description of the long process of getting a diagnosis, the many consultations, the depiction of the treatment and of my father’s slow decay. My father had had access to the best that Soviet medicine had to offer, and I slowly realized another wrinkle in the censors’ hostility—an uneasiness about the portrayal of this kind of medical care. Word of the manuscript got out somehow and there was pressure from PEN, who kept asking why Artyom Laukhin had not been published in years in his own country. In the end, I went along with all the cuts and changes they asked for. I capitulated.
INTERVIEWER
Conversations with My Father came out in 1972, and Soviet readers loved the book.
LAUKHIN
It was my first book since Youthful Eminences fourteen years earlier. Fourteen years! Conversations appeared initially in Druzhba Narodov, in two installments: in the fall of 1972, and in the spring of the following year. The following year it came out as a book. It was well received and surprisingly popular, even with readers not particularly interested in the literary life. It touched many people. They could relate to it because many of them had aging or sick parents.
Conversations had several reprints, in rather large runs, which was one of the reasons I was accused of bootlicking. The large print runs were a surprise to me at first, but I know now why they happened; it was my gingerbread, my pryanik. You see, I was no longer an active dissident, and I had agreed to the changes and the cuts in Conversations. I was a reformed rebel who had seen the truth. As such, I had to be rewarded. The knut, the threat, had worked on me. The knut i pryanik—the whip and the gingerbread, like the stick and the carrot in English.
The difficulties I had with Conversations confirmed for me that my father’s journal would never be published in the Soviet Union. It strengthened my decision to leave.
INTERVIEWER
Are you saying that your father’s wish to have his journal published was the only reason you left?
LAUKHIN
I can almost say that. I don’t have to tell you that writers or poets, particularly poets, are not eager to change countries and languages.
INTERVIEWER
Why in 1978? You were born in 1936, so you were, what, forty-two years old. Why not earlier?
LAUKHIN
My father had been a Soviet millionaire, one of the few legitimate ones, and all from his books. One talks about best-sellers here in the West, but it’s nothing compared to what happens back home. Yefremov’s Andromeda sold twenty million copies in one year. Twenty million in one year, in one country! My father’s books sold in the millions. They weren’t bad novels, you know—my father was a skillful writer in a popular genre—and even in the lean years after the war publishers would make sure there was enough paper for the books the vozhd liked. I was four or five years old when a large apartment—large by Soviet standards—in the rent-subsidized Writer’s Union building on Lavrushinsky Lane became our home. I had a privileged childhood and youth. We had an all-seasons dacha in Peredelkino, which my father, later, had the good sense to buy. He made significant additions and improvements to it. My father literally didn’t know what to do with his money. All of it was left to me and my sister, since our mother died a few years before my father did. After his death I went on living in our apartment on Lavrushinsky Lane. I had an easy, charmed life. True, they stopped publishing me in the sixties, but my samizdat poetry was on everybody’s lips. I was admired, lionized, I was—how do you call it here?—a pop star. I read in front of large audiences, and people screamed my name. Poets in the Soviet Union are respected, as the doomed Mandelstam said. They have influence, traction. I was significant over there; I’m not here. I’m not complaining. It sounds odd, but I’m an ignored pauper here compared to what I was and had there. This house is not mine, and I don’t own a dacha. This is not a complaint either—I’m only listing the reasons why it took me a while to leave.
I had to be certain too that there was no chance that my father’s journal would be printed in the Soviet Union. That was what he had wanted, to be published in his country and read by his people. For many years I nurtured the hope, the delusion that maybe next year, past the next bend in the river, things would turn out for the better.
There was also the matter of getting the nine notebooks containing the journal out of the Soviet Union. That added a few years.
INTERVIEWER
How did you get them out?
LAUKHIN
I had help, of course. But I’d rather not say more than that.
INTERVIEWER
Why in the spring of 1978?
LAUKHIN
I was in New York in March 1978 at the invitation of the Mystery Writers of America. It was the first time in twenty years I was allowed abroad. The Second International Congress of Crime Writers was being held in Manhattan, and I was asked to be a keynote speaker and talk about Pavel Laukhin’s novels. I talked to a crowded (and overheated) room because they had made a great deal about my father, in the typical American way of exaggerating everything—Pavel Laukhin, Stalin’s favourite author. He’d never been, of course not, Stalin was far from a simpleton. Anyway, I gave the speech, and didn’t return home. My father’s notebooks were out of the Soviet Union by then.
INTERVIEWER
You were not allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union for twenty years?
LAUKHIN
That’s right. I tried several times, and I was always refused a passport. I had invitations from fellow poets in the West to visit them, an invitation to teach at Columbia University for a semester, and several invitations to address PEN gatherings, the last one in Holland. Each of my applications was turned down.
INTERVIEWER
Why was it approved in 1978?
LAUKHIN
Various members of PEN had written many times to the Soviet Writers’ Union about my inability to travel outside the Soviet Union. News of this was passed along, I’m sure, to those who make decisions on such matters, and these interventions on my behalf may have had a cumulative effect.
INTERVIEWER
You left your wife, pregnant at the time with your child, in Moscow. Could it be that the authorities believed it would be less likely you’d defect with a pregnant wife waiting for you at home?
LAUKHIN
It could be.
INTERVIEWER
Your wife divorced you and remarried soon afterward.
LAUKHIN
From what I hear she’s quite happy.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve never seen your child.
LAUKHIN
I haven’t, no.
INTERVIEWER
It’s a boy, isn’t it?
LAUKHIN
A boy, yes.
INTERVIEWER
Don’t you want to see your child? He’
s, what, six years old now?
LAUKHIN
I thought the interview was about my father’s journal.
INTERVIEWER
Okay. In 1978, you defected. You spent the first few months of your new life in New York, with friends. You were in France for a while, and then in Germany. You visited London for a couple of weeks. For a long time you gave no interviews, and Pavel Laukhin’s journal was only a rumour. Your only public statement was that you had yet to make up your mind where to live, where to put down new roots. You visited Solzhenitsyn in Vermont, but avoided the press afterward. There were articles about you, of course, and eventually many interviews.
LAUKHIN
Some not that friendly.
INTERVIEWER
Some not that friendly. The gist of them seemed to be that you were one of the young rebels in the Soviet Union in the sixties, after the end of the thaw, and you often seemed only inches away from disaster. You charmed your way through, riding on your talent and wit, to a unique position that allowed you trips to the West and saw your poetry published in many languages. You managed to appeal to Western tastes without wholly displeasing your Kremlin masters. You were an enigma in the free world—how you managed to sit on the fence so well and for so long. You were clever, said some, surviving, making the best out of what you were dealt. It was suspicious, said others, who drew comparisons to Yevtushenko and Eherenburg years before. Last year, Yakov Zladsky called you an adroit bootlicker. Did that make you angry?
LAUKHIN
It did—the outright lies, the exaggerations. To give you an example, my only trip to the West before I defected was a week in Paris in 1958. I was sent there with a group of Soviet writers and poets, and was shown off as a young, new talent. I was never allowed abroad again except to communist Hungary later in the same year. That one trip to Paris became “trips to the West.” And, in his interview, Zladsky said, “Artyom Laukhin should explain his frequent trips to the West.” Now, in 1958, my first collection of poetry, Youthful Eminences, most of it a naive paean to space and rocketry, had just come out in the Soviet Union. It had very good reviews, and the print run was not small. I was a published and popular poet at the age of twenty-three. I read from Youthful Eminences in halls, in clubs, at official gatherings, in private apartments. A few poems, some with easy, rhyming stanzas, were put to music. I was young, and young people looked up to me. Such things go to one’s head and you begin to believe that nothing can stand in your way. That’s why my inability to publish Sunless Seasons a few years later came as such a shock. Sunless Seasons clearly lacked the optimism of Youthful Eminences, but it was mainly introspective poetry with no political statements. I wrote the poems between 1958 and 1962, a rather difficult time for me. My mother died in 1957, my father in 1961. I learned about my father’s journal during that period, and I read it for the first time. I was a witness to Pasternak’s humiliation after he was awarded the Nobel. All these factors, and the slow realization that there was something very wrong with our country made Sunless Seasons sunless, grey, preoccupied with death, with personal panics in small cluttered rooms, with love that goes wrong or is misunderstood. For a year or so I did the rounds of the literary magazines and publishing houses. I found no takers. I was told it was too pessimistic, that, while not overtly political, it had a latent poisonous message. About half a dozen or so poems from it were published in various magazines and literary journals over the next two or three years, in a slow, irritating drip, but the bulk of Sunless Seasons became samizdat material. It was better poetry than Youthful Eminences, much better, and it was an underground success. I began to associate myself with “bad” people, the kind who were eventually called dissidents in the West. I stopped writing poetry for several years; what was the point if you couldn’t publish it? I was there, in Pushkin Square, in December 1965, after Andrei Siniavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested, demanding open trials and respect of the constitution. I demonstrated for their fair trial, and read in Mayakovsky Square. After they were convicted, a letter asking for their release was sent to the Twenty-third Congress of the CPSU. I signed it. I spent a few nights in Lubyanka for that and, later, when Sunless Seasons was published in the West, I was subjected to a psychiatric assessment.
I was lucky, though, on two counts. First, because I was a poet. Poetry never disturbed the authorities in the Soviet Union as much as prose, and for good reason: fewer readers, of course, and the metaphorical, compressed, indirect way messages are usually expressed in good poetry. Second, I was in a car accident in January 1967. There was a demonstration in Pushkin Square against the new laws on “anti-Soviet statements” and on what they termed “unauthorized declarations” that had been added to the criminal code. The protesters were arrested and the organizers eventually tried and punished. I was one of the leaders, and I would have been there but for the accident. It happened in the first hours of that year. There were three of us, driving back to the city after a spirited night. I mean, we weren’t exactly sober. It was winter, slippery, and the little Moskvich rolled over several times through a ditch and crashed into a tree. It was bad. A friend, the driver, died. The third person in the car—somebody we were giving a ride back to Moscow and whom we hardly knew—was in the backseat. He was hurt too, but not as badly as I was. I was in a coma for a week. I had a broken leg in two places, broken ribs, internal bleeding, a broken arm and a broken collarbone. It took me a year and a half to fully recover.
INTERVIEWER
You call this luck?
LAUKHIN
I spent months and months in hospitals and rehabilitation centres, the last one a sanatorium in Bolshevo, not far from Moscow. I was able to walk by then, hobble around. I used to walk past the Bolshevo dacha Tsvetayeva lived in for four months in 1939. It’s hard for a poet to be in Bolshevo and not think of Tsvetayeva. I wrote much of Bolshevo Days that spring of 1968. I was in pain, my leg still hurt, but I was happy. I was alive, to start with, and I was writing poetry again. I also knew that Bolshevo Days was a good poem, much better than anything I’d written before. And I realized that I could be a poet, or I could be dissident—a fighter for democracy and human rights in my country—but I could not be both. Others could do it, better people, but I couldn’t. I also realized how fragile life was. A trite observation, of course, but I had to calm down if I was to go on as a poet and if I was to fulfill my father’s wish and publish his journal. So I wrote poetry no one wanted to publish, began Conversations, and plotted my departure. I had to find a way of getting my father’s notebooks to the West as well. They had to be sent abroad before I left—I couldn’t risk carrying them with me. All this took me almost ten years. I wasn’t in a hurry, I took my time. I knew that I’d write my best poetry while I was still relatively young and among Russian speakers.
The publication of my poetry in the West—first a trickle, then more after Bolshevo Days—made it easier to think of leaving the Soviet Union. I knew I’d go at some point but, perhaps unconsciously, I procrastinated. Meanwhile, Conversations kept me busy.
I did a couple of movie scripts too, based on my father’s novels. A friend of mine was a director at Mosfilm. I had a good time doing them. I presume the bootlicking label came from that, from being seen with actresses and directors and party big whales (who always liked movies and actresses). Yes, I was bootlicking, but, it should be noted, Zladsky is an envious little man. Yes, I drank and laughed with the powerful and the fat-necked, and I even read them my poetry, which they wouldn’t publish. But I never stabbed any of my fellow poets or writers in the back. You can’t say the same about little man Zladsky, who seems to enjoy doing it lately. I never signed any condemnation, and I never raised my voice in a meeting or forum to denounce or castigate a fellow artist.
INTERVIEWER
Bolshevo Days was the poem through which the West came to know you.
LAUKHIN
Both the critics’ and the readers’ reaction to Bolshevo Days were miracles. But the first poems that were pub
lished in the West were from Sunless Seasons. In the summer of 1964, a poem from it appeared in Grani. It happened without my consent or knowledge, but I wasn’t upset—not at all. I quite liked the poem, a melancholy piece, somewhat angry, and quite long, the longest in Sunless Seasons. It was this poem that was always singled out as having a poisonous message and being typical of the entire collection. I was summoned to the Writers’ Union and was told to disown it. They were furious. “How?” I asked. “How does one disown one’s own poem? It’s done, it’s out there already, in Grani, you can’t say it didn’t happen. It’s like the air we breathe out, you can’t take it back.” (I remember one of them telling me it was unbearably bad breath.) They asked me to write something to the effect that the poem wasn’t by me, and they’d get the appropriate newspapers and magazines to print it. They already had something for me to sign. I refused. I was later called to the Tse-Ka’s building in the Old Square—Tse-Ka is short for the Central Committee—where I met with Dmitry Polikarpov, then the head of the Cultural Section. The chief cultural strangler, as Solzenitsyn called him in his memoirs. Polikarpov asked me the same thing—to disown my own poem, say it was stolen, condemn its publication. I refused. He made all kinds of threats, including being expelled from the Writers’ Union. I stalled. I said I needed time to think. Polikarpov seemed edgy, hesitant, and that gave me some courage. There were rumours Khruschev was not happy with him. I thought time might be on my side. It was, but not the way I expected. Those were months when the sanovniki—the highest of them, the bolshie kity, the big whales—had little time for vermin like me, as one of Polikarpov’s assistants told me. They were frantically dealing with the Cuban crisis. Soon afterward Khrushchev was dismissed and replaced, and not much later Polikarpov was replaced too. And, somehow, they either forgot about me, or they had bigger things to worry about. Well, you need a bit of luck in life. And then, a few years later, in early 1968, Sunless Seasons, the whole collection, was published by the YMCA Press in Paris. I was still recovering from my accident at the time.
INTERVIEWER
