Exiled Novelist Lights Up Moscow’s Underground

Surprise! Moscow isn’t just a drab, cold town full of dying politicians.

The capital of Mother Russia has its frustrated yuppie class too.

And that, greatly simplified, is what novelist Vassily Aksyonov’s life and work are about: Moscow’s cultural underground, a free-floating spiritual and intellectual neighborhood where the talented, rebellious, thwarted, morally agonized children of the revolution live lives of sexually uninhibited, loud, drunken desperation.

Underground Figure Until he was exiled in 1980, Aksyonov, 52, was a central figure in that underground. Moreover, it was his novel about that life--first published in Italy--that got him a one-way ticket across the border from the KGB. Now, “The Burn” (Random House, $18.95) is available in English, translated by Michael Glenny.

It’s partly an autobiographical work, including details of Aksyonov’s medical training and his childhood in Siberia, where his mother was a political prisoner. But the novel is also a portrait of a generation of Russians who grew up under Stalin, experienced a bit of freedom under Khrushchev and saw the straitjacket dusted off under Brezhnev.

“The Burn” is a difficult book, full of flights of absurdist fantasy, contempt for traditional narrative and an exuberance for life that sets it apart from many restrained, cool contemporary novels. Such qualities are facets of a Russian literary tradition, Aksyonov maintained in an interview.

Admittedly, that tradition is less well known than the one epitomized by Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov conceded. But before the revolution, the urban elites of Russia produced avant-garde artists who helped give surreal fantasy a good name.

“The Burn,” he said, is an attempt at “the restoration of this broken chain of tradition which was broken artificially by a cruel force (the Russian Revolution).”

The life style he describes in the novel also is a reflection of his generation’s “subconscious attempt to restore broken links with the West. Russian art and literature were a real part of European culture, there’s not doubt about that.”

1961 Novel a Success His other books include “The Island of Crimea,” published in the United States in 1983, and “Half-way to the Moon,” a 1961 novel that established his reputation in Russia and the West. However, he frequently ran afoul of Soviet authorities. “The Burn,” which is suppressed in Russia, represents the culmination of his disaffection with the Soviet state, he said.

Aksyonov--who has the build of a football lineman, looks younger than he is, smokes Marlboros and wore a mauve button-down shirt with a knit tie the day he was interviewed--is a calm, affable man whose demeanor betrays nothing of his past. There is none of the Old Testament indignation of Solzhenitsyn, for instance. Until he speaks, he might be mistaken for a retired athlete dreaming of games long ago.

But when he talks, Aksyonov becomes a complicated blend of the mystical and the mundane.

“In a book like ‘The Burn,’ I deliberately didn’t fix a season of the year,” he said, “Maybe the winter shifted to the spring immediately and without any difficulties. It was a journey of the soul, the lonely desperate soul. It wouldn’t matter where or in what succession events happened. It’s a discussion of all dimensions, partially based on my own experience but mostly on the observation of other people. There is also the problem of heavy drinking here, so that the alcoholic approach to the environment is important too. . . . The parties, they’re typical for Russia, for Moscow.”

In fact, “The Burn” is for Moscow insiders, he said. It’s full of private jokes and private knowledge, so much so that a reader might be helped greatly by bending an elbow a few times in one of that city’s jazz dives.

Today, life is very different for Aksyonov. He lives with his wife in Washington, D.C., where he teaches at two colleges and continues to write. It’s a quiet existence that contrasts sharply with the time when he was a member of the Soviet Union’s privileged class and burning both ends of the candle.

“I would say that I am now looking for a new kind of exuberance,” he said. “I still love the atmosphere of the bars and heavy smoking, drinking parties, but I am myself not as I used to be. I’m getting older, but I am still in love with my past despite all its hardships and difficulties, even happiness sometimes. That was a period when it was really hard to go to sleep.”

Don’t think that Aksyonov is so mired in the past that he’s miserable in the present. “I do enjoy my life here,” he explained. “I do enjoy my position of estranged author. It seems to me that the Russian culture needs this period of expulsion (for artists and dissidents) because we were for such a long time isolated from the rest of the world. Of course, I miss my country and sometimes I’m really outraged that I cannot go back.”

Aksyonov got his first taste of America 10 years ago when he came to Los Angeles during the thaw of detente. He spent two months at UCLA as a visiting professor, went back home and wrote a book (officially approved) about his experiences.

“It was titled ‘Nonstop Around the Clock,’ ” he recalled. “It didn’t contain any negative sides of American life, it was just tourist rapture, nothing else. Maybe because that was the most carefree time of my life. I was absolutely free here, alone. Twice a week I had my classes, which are absolutely nothing to talk about, believe me. So I spent a lot of time on the beaches. That was really a wonderful carnival time in my life. But now I am writing a book as a local person about America and it’s supposed to get a lot of negative sides.”

While he likes his new nation, Aksyonov said he is troubled by America’s isolation from the rest of the world. He was startled, he said, when a high-ranking politician told him that European protests against the deployment of nuclear missiles there were caused partly by envy of the United States’ wealth. The politician apparently did not know that European nations have become prosperous and that some have standards of living higher than this country’s, he added.

Many Russians who have immigrated to this country in the past decade have had some rude shocks, Aksyonov said. “Due to Soviet anti-American propaganda, many Russians developed absolutely idealistic ideas about this country. It was a sort of reverse result; they didn’t believe any negative sides--unemployment and crime.”

For Aksyonov, though, America’s warts are an attraction. “Now that I’m here I can see a lot of the problems of this really great country and it makes this country closer to me,” he said. “I wouldn’t say I would love this country better if there was only serenity here.”

When it came time to put down roots, Aksyonov chose the East Coast because it felt more like home.

“I love it here in Los Angeles. Also, I am always eager to come here, but for a while, not for staying for good,” he explained. “Strangely enough, I have a feeling of separation from something when I’m here for a long time. Maybe that’s because it’s far away from the Atlantic, from Europe. This city itself is so unusual for urbanized people of Moscow and Leningrad. That’s why we chose Washington, D.C., by the way, because it feels like a European city. It has the dimensions of a European city, a big but not too big European city.”

No matter where he lives, Aksyonov doubts that he will ever produce another novel like “The Burn.”

“This was not normal literary production,” he said. “In order to get another book like this I would have to get another incarnation.”