by Viv Groskop
My plan was a roaring success. Early doors, the interview referenced Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Chekhov’s short stories. I said sage and mature things I didn’t really understand about naturalism and symbolism. Then came the question, from the Russian tutor interviewing me, an extraordinary and terrifying woman and, it occurred to me, the first Russian I had encountered face to face. She was like something out of Harry Potter: a cross between Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall and Madame Maxime, the headmistress of the French girls’ school played by a giantess version of Frances de la Tour. Imagine this person crossed with a Russian empress turned ballet instructor and you have a quarter of an idea of the magnitude of this lady. During the interview, the telephone rang, and she picked up the receiver and said things in clipped, terrifying Russian. My jaw was on the floor. It was the closest I had come to being in a Bond film.
She put down the phone, smiled tightly and asked the question I had been waiting for: ‘And have you read any more contemporary literature?’ It was the coded question that really meant: ‘Have you read any Solzhenitsyn?’ ‘Yes,’ I beamed, knowing the right answer. ‘Solzhenitsyn.’ I pronounced it ‘Solzy-nit-sin’, as if it were some kind of cough medicine from the Robitussin family, not knowing how to pronounce the ‘zh’ bit. I didn’t blame myself for this or feel bad about it. I mean, who speaks English as a native language and is comfortable saying ‘Solzhenitsyn’? (In a headline in the mid-1970s, reporting on one of his anti-Western tirades, the Daily Mirror called him ‘Solzhenitwit’.) ‘And what Solzhenitsyn have you read?’ she murmured, pronouncing the name carefully and correctly in an attempt to make me remember it. She stared at the floor, as if already aware of the fact that I was getting in way out of my depth. ‘Er, One Day in the Life of Ivan –’ I didn’t know how to pronounce ‘Denisovich’. (The stress falls on the second syllable: De-NEES-ovich. It’s one of the more melodic patronymics.) ‘Ivan Denisovich,’ she smiled. ‘And what do you think of it?’
This was a difficult question to answer as, drawing on Brezhnev’s inspiring example of holding firm opinions about books without having actually read them, I had only got through about the first ten pages. I knew that it was about a man in the Gulag. I had a very hazy understanding of what the Gulag was. I knew that Solzhenitsyn was important and controversial and anti-Soviet. I suddenly became nervous that the person interviewing me might not be anti-Soviet and so I would be judged for praising that side of his work … I needed to say something that would not reveal my ignorance and would show that I was capable of thinking on my feet. Miraculously, I found the answer, taking a huge risk, as it could have been factually wrong: ‘It’s an extraordinary piece of literature because it occupies the space of an entire novel and yet it really is just about one day in the life of one man.’
I said this slowly and deliberately, as if it were very profound. I genuinely believed it as I said it, as I still think it’s a pretty bold and outlandish move to say, ‘I know, I’ll write a novel about the Gulag. Only I’ll just write the whole thing about one day in the life of one man. I can just stretch it out. Who needs to know about what happens over more than twenty-four hours? If it’s good enough for Mrs Dalloway …’ And yet, it was also a profoundly stupid thing to say because it was so bloody obvious. And, more crucially, because I hadn’t read it, I didn’t have any evidence that the novel really did cover only one day (for all I knew, it could have spanned a thousand years and the ‘one day’ of the title was just part of a flashback). Anyway. Whatever I said was the right thing to say, and I passed the test. The first Groskop in a university. A hundred and thirty years after my great-great-grandfather had first entered the country as a Polish Jew whose descendants later refused to acknowledge or just kind of forgot that he was a Polish Jew. Not that I knew that at the time. Otherwise, I might not have been in a room pretending to know about Solzhenitsyn.
It took me years to return to Solzhenitsyn, having found his work very hard to engage with when I was a student. If one of the great lessons of his work is about continuing doggedly on in the face of great adversity, this is – ironically enough – a lesson you really need to absorb in order to read anything he has ever written. Even his compatriots feel this way. Solzhenitsyn occupies a strange, complicated and sometimes unwelcome place in the minds of Russians. His work is not quite literary and yet it’s among some of the greatest literature (perhaps some of the only true literature) of the Soviet period. And yet he’s not quite a historian because he’s a writer. Neither did he do himself any favours when he returned to Russia as an old man. He held a combination of extremely progressive and extremely reactionary views, much of them rooted, Tolstoy-style, in spirituality, morality and the Orthodox Church. Much like Tolstoy, he would perhaps have been better suited to a life as a monk than a life as a writer forced to take on the status quo.
One episode that illustrates perfectly the trouble with Solzhenitsyn is the theme of the speech he gave as a Commencement Address at Harvard University in 1978, when he had settled in the United States. Bearing in mind that he’s a Soviet exile and one of the greatest writers in the world, to be fair, it can’t have been easy to know what to talk about that would move his audience. So what does he choose as his engaging, crowd-pleasing topic? ‘Anthropocentrism in Modern Western Culture’. This is just a fancy way of saying that we care more about humans than we care about nature and the planet (and he has a very good point). But it strikes me as typically provocative of Solzhenitsyn. He can’t quite bring himself to be anti-Soviet. And so he finds another way of attacking the West: ‘Don’t be smug, you guys! You are obsessed with yourselves!’ And he launches it upon people with a fancy-schmancy annoying title. This could be a very brave thing to do. But it strikes me as incredibly pompous and self-serving, and it’s one of the reasons I couldn’t get along with Solzhenitsyn as a personality for a long time.
I have, however, become fond of him because of his extreme, uncompromising reputation. In short, everyone should love Solzhenitsyn, because he was hardcore. Remember the missing vertebra. He did not just write about how to survive adversity, he lived it out, even when he was not facing that much adversity any more. There is no account of him ever having taken a day off, or a holiday. The tales of his time living in America illustrate this. The locals there protected his privacy, which meant everything to him. The nearby grocery store, Joe Allan’s, was famous for its handwritten sign: ‘No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns’. After his death, in 2008, his former neighbours in Vermont reported that he had been ‘fairly enigmatic’. He was rarely interviewed while he lived in the US. His opinion was much sought during the period of perestroika and glasnost in the late 1980s, but he simply shrugged and said there was not much point in saying anything because things were moving so quickly that any opinion would soon be outdated. He was once interviewed by the local magazine Vermont Life, which reported that he seemed to work 24/7 and that the light in his writer’s cabin never went out. A local doctor who treated Solzhenitsyn’s children said, ‘No matter how late it was, he seemed to be working.’ (I love that ‘seemed’. It would have been great if he was actually watching cartoons. Unlikely, unfortunately. More likely, he was trying to crush another vertebra.) As the Russian journalist Vitali Vitaliev has reported, Solzhenitsyn kept regular hours and did so religiously: from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day for seventeen years, supposedly without a day off. Sometimes, he broke off to hit a ball across the adjacent tennis court. Wild.
This kind of regime cannot be maintained without the support of a spouse. One of my favourite lines in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich reveals Solzhenitsyn’s attitude towards women, which is typical of his time, but there is perhaps some self-awareness there, too. (Perhaps. I’m being generous.) When Ivan Denisovich describes the making up of his bed, how he tries to keep it clean, how he sews a hunk of bread into his mattress where no one can steal it, he marvels at how unnecessarily intricate bedlinen is outside prison. Why would you bother with all that when you can
just put a blanket on a mattress? He writes: ‘… it even seemed odd for women to bother about sheets, all that extra laundering.’ (Women! They’re so crazy! They make you put sheets on the bed!) Of course, outside prison, it’s the women who bother with everything, who look after you and keep your life running. This was pretty much Solzhenitsyn’s experience of life. I remember reading an interview with his second wife, the one who went to the US with him, in which she explained that Solzhenitsyn was a person who never answered the telephone because she would always answer it for him. That is how you get a lot of writing done.
Solzhenitsyn’s first wife gave some extraordinary interviews about their life together before he became famous. She also spoke awkwardly about his second marriage, adding that at least it was easy for him not to forget his second wife’s name, as they were both called Natalia. (I know it’s wrong to be entertained by this. But it’s funny.) I have a lot of sympathy for everyone involved here, as it must have been awful to live through: the KGB ‘sponsored’ a series of books denouncing Solzhenitsyn, one of which was a memoir which went out under his first wife’s name. He and those close to him were subjected to a constant campaign of intimidation.
I think, underneath it all, Solzhenitsyn was a kind-hearted man. The immense personal price he paid in order to keep writing is unimaginable. He was always scribbling away in tiny notebooks and transcribing things and hiding them and burning bits of manuscript in a bonfire in the garden so that the KGB wouldn’t find them. What sort of person would you become in these circumstances? When the writer Lydia Chukovskaya was interviewed by David Remnick of the New Yorker about her friendship with Solzhenitsyn in the early 1970s, she told him how they would keep similar writing hours and he would be anxious not to disturb her. He would leave notes on the fridge that said things like: ‘If you are free at nine, let’s listen to the radio together.’ That is resilience. I was going to need a lot of it to overcome my irritation that I was not Russian. I felt like I’d had a vertebra removed. But, unlike Solzhenitsyn, the pain didn’t motivate me. Instead of carrying on, I felt like collapsing.
9. How to Have a Sense of Humour about Life: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
(Or: Don’t get run over by a tram after talking to Satan)
‘ “And what is your particular field of work?” asked Berlioz. “I specialise in black magic.” ’
If many Russian classics are dark and deep and full of the horrors of the blackness of the human soul (or, indeed, are about the Gulag), then this is the one book to buck the trend. Of all the Russian classics, The Master and Margarita is undoubtedly the most cheering. It’s funny, it’s profound and it has to be read to be believed. In some ways, the book has an odd reputation. It is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century and as a masterpiece of magical realism, but it’s very common even for people who are very well read not to have heard of it, although among Russians you have only to mention a cat the size of a pig and apricot juice that makes you hiccup and everyone will know what you are talking about. Most of all, it is the book that saved me when I felt like I had wasted my life. It’s a novel that encourages you not to take yourself too seriously, no matter how bad things have got. The Master and Margarita is a reminder that, ultimately, everything is better if you can inject a note of silliness and of the absurd. Not only is this a possibility at any time; occasionally, it’s an absolute necessity: ‘You’ve got to laugh. Otherwise you’d cry.’
For those who already know and love The Master and Margarita, there is something of a cult-like ‘circle of trust’ thing going on. I’ve formed friendships with people purely on the strength of the knowledge that they have read and enjoyed this novel. I have a friend who married her husband almost exclusively because he told her he had read it. I would normally say that it’s not a great idea to found a lifelong relationship on the basis of liking one particular book. But, in this case, it’s a very special book. So, if you are unmarried, and you love it and you meet someone else who loves it, you should definitely marry them. It’s the most entertaining and comforting novel. When I was feeling low about not being able to pretend to be Russian any more, I would read bits of it to cheer myself up and remind myself that, whatever the truth about where I come from, I had succeeded in understanding some important things about another culture. It is a book that takes your breath away and makes you laugh out loud, sometimes at its cleverness, sometimes because it’s just so funny and ridiculous. I might have kidded myself that you need to be a bit Russian to understand Tolstoy. But with Bulgakov, all you need to understand him is a sense of humour. His comedy is universal.
Written in the 1930s but not published until the 1960s, The Master and Margarita is the most breathtakingly original piece of work. Few books can match it for weirdness. The devil, Woland, comes to Moscow with a retinue of terrifying henchmen, including, of course, the giant talking cat (literally ‘the size of a pig’), a witch and a wall-eyed assassin with one yellow fang. They appear to be targeting Moscow’s literary elite. Woland meets Berlioz, influential magazine editor and chairman of the biggest Soviet writers’ club. (Berlioz has been drinking the hiccup-inducing apricot juice.) Berlioz believes Woland to be some kind of German professor. Woland predicts Berlioz’s death, which almost instantly comes to pass when the editor is decapitated in a freak accident involving a tram and a spillage of sunflower oil. All this happens within the first few pages.
A young poet, Ivan Bezdomny (his surname means ‘Homeless’), has witnessed this incident and heard Woland telling a bizarre story about Pontius Pilate. (This ‘Procurator of Judaea’ narrative is interspersed between the ‘Moscow’ chapters.) Bezdomny attempts to chase Woland and his gang but ends up in a lunatic asylum, ranting about an evil professor who is obsessed with Pontius Pilate. In the asylum, he meets the Master, a writer who has been locked away for writing a novel about Jesus Christ and, yes, Pontius Pilate. The story of the relationship between Christ and Pilate, witnessed by Woland and recounted by the Master, returns at intervals throughout the novel and, eventually, both stories tie in together. (Stick with me here. Honestly, it’s big fun.)
Meanwhile, outside the asylum, Woland has taken over Berlioz’s flat and is hosting magic shows for Moscow’s elite. He summons the Master’s mistress, Margarita, who has remained loyal to the writer and his work. At a midnight ball hosted by Satan, Woland offers Margarita the chance to become a witch with magical powers. This happens on Good Friday, the day Christ is crucified. (Seriously, all this makes perfect sense when you are reading the book. And it is not remotely confusing. I promise.) At the ball, there is a lot of naked dancing and cavorting (oh, suddenly you’re interested and want to read this book?) and then Margarita starts flying around naked, first across Moscow and then the USSR. Again, I repeat: this all makes sense within the context of the book.
Woland grants Margarita one wish. She chooses the most altruistic thing possible, liberating a woman she meets at the ball from eternal suffering. The devil decides not to count this wish and gives her another one. This time, Margarita chooses to free the Master. Woland is not happy about this and gets her and the Master to drink poisoned wine. They come together again in the afterlife, granted ‘peace’ but not ‘light’, a limbo situation that has caused academics to wrap themselves up in knots for years. Why doesn’t Bulgakov absolve them? Why do both Jesus and the Devil seem to agree on their punishment? Bulgakov seems to suggest that you should always choose freedom – but expect it to come at a price.
One of the great strengths of The Master and Margarita is its lightness of tone. It’s full of cheap (but good) jokes at the expense of the literati, who get their comeuppance for rejecting the Master’s work. (This is a parallel of Bulgakov’s experience; he was held at arm’s length by the Soviet literary establishment and ‘allowed’ to work only in the theatre, and even then with some difficulty). In dealing so frivolously and surreally with the nightmare society in which Woland wreaks havoc, Bulgakov’s satir
e becomes vicious without even needing to draw blood. His characters are in a sort of living hell, but they never quite lose sight of the fact that entertaining and amusing things are happening around them. However darkly comedic these things might sometimes be.
While The Master and Margarita is a hugely complex novel, with its quasi-religious themes and its biting critique of the Soviet system, above all it’s a big fat lesson in optimism through laughs. If you can’t see the funny side of your predicament, then what is the point of anything? Bulgakov loves to make fun of everyone and everything. ‘There’s only one way a man can walk round Moscow in his underwear – when he’s being escorted by the police on the way to a police station!’ (This is when Ivan Bezdomny appears, half naked, at the writers’ restaurant to tell them a strange character has come to Moscow and murdered their colleague.) ‘I’d rather be a tram conductor and there’s no job worse than that.’ (The giant cat talking rubbish at Satan’s ball.) ‘The only thing that can save a mortally wounded cat is a drink of paraffin.’ (More cat gibberish.)
