Making It in Literary Moscow

The devil, his demons and a talking black cat appear suddenly in Moscow in Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1938 masterpiece, “The Master and Margarita.” Suppressed by Stalin, the novel was not published until 1966. Since then, the stairwell to Bulgakov’s apartment, the putative site of the extraordinary events he details, has been decorated with graffiti cats by literary pilgrims.

I was advised to visit the site when I stopped in London recently, en route to Moscow. At the Soho office of International PEN, I also picked up a list of writers concerned with perestroika, some of whom had represented the Soviet Union in May at the PEN congress at which six Soviet centers joined the world association of writers.

When I was chair of the Writers in Prison Committee for PEN Center USA West, nearly 150 writers were imprisoned in the U.S.S.R. Today the number is down to three. Not only Bulgakov’s novel but Boris Pasternak’s works are available in bookstores. So are Vladimir Nabokov’s, mention of whose name was virtually forbidden only five years ago. And soon Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” will be published in both Estonian and Russian.

In my hotel room near Lenin Prospect, I began telephoning the writers--an ordinary enough gesture but one I am advised would have been foolhardy even a year ago--whose telephone numbers I had in hand. (There is no telephone directory in Moscow.) Those I reached were happy to get together to exchange information on what it is like to be a writer today in the Soviet Union and in the United States.

Throughout the week I met with four card-carrying members of the Writer’s Union (a membership satirized by Bulgakov), two of whom are women, and with an astronomer-poet who is light years away from the literary Establishment.

Russians read seriously. Half a century ago Stalin recognized writers as “the engineers of the soul.” He understood their status in Russian society and tried simultaneously to placate and control them. Pushkin and Gorky were elevated to Olympian heights. Isaac Babel and Osip Mandlestam were murdered. And he established the tenets of Soviet Realism as an artistic straitjacket, removing from the canon satirical fantasies like Bulgakov’s. His stick was suppression, or worse. His carrot--membership in the Writer’s Union.

Vladimir Stabnikov greeted me in front of a statue of Tolstoy in the garden. The Writer’s Union is a large, graceful building in the embassy-row quarter of Moscow, originally the home of a friend of Tolstoy, the Countess Alsufyeva, and the setting for the scene in “War and Peace” where Pierre becomes a mason. Chartered in 1932, the union claims 10,000 members today, although now, as in the past, there are famous writers who have never applied for membership, and others of stature who have been rejected or expelled. But membership brings with it such a host of privileges that few can afford to ignore it. Members enjoy access to special housing, loans, and summers at writers’ colonies, as well as the considerable prestige of joining the elite in this most highly stratified society.

Stabnikov, handsome and intense with dark eyes and a dark beard, is a union official, a consultant in the International department, who represented the Writer’s Union in the Soviet delegation in Holland. We talked in his office and as we walked along the corridors and down the stairs to an elegant wainscoted dining room. On the way we passed through a bar where a small crowd watched the new Congress of People’s Deputies on television. All week, wherever I went, salespeople, strollers, even policemen were watching the Congress. Stabnikov acknowledged the phenomenon as a national catharsis where for the first time people could hear on the street truths that used to be called “kitchen talk.”

Stabnikov is optimistic about glasnost, but wary about perestroika . “A thousand churches have opened in the past year,” he noted, “but people still complain about the shortage of soap.” Stabnikov’s own recent accomplishment is yet one more testimonial to glasnost: He translated “The Russia House,” John le Carre’s newest espionage novel, into Russian. And he pointed out, eyes twinkling, that it has become very popular without benefit of advertising, talk shows or bookstore appearances. I cannot tell if the capitalist style of promoting books pleases or offends him.

There doesn’t seem to be any need, at the moment, to convince Soviet citizens that they ought to buy certain books. Word of mouth suffices to make hot commodities of the newly released work of once suppressed writers. Not everything is off the censor’s list, of course. The authorities recently stopped the distribution of a Russian edition of Freud.

And the Writer’s Union? It is more than an elegant club with good food and copying facilities (unavailable generally in the Soviet Union). Along with material perks, Stabnikov explains, each member has the right to hire a secretary, a position sometimes filled in difficult times by non-union writers, like Josef Brodsky, to shelter them from prosecution for the crime of parasitism.

Translators such as himself, Stabnikov explained, are a large portion of the membership. In the multilingual federation that is the Soviet Union, translators not only translate literature from English into Russian as Stabnikov does (he also translates from Portuguese), they also translate literature from Russian into Armenian, Georgian, Estonian and the other official languages of the Soviet Union.

Just back from the West, Stabnikov agrees with my observation that writers here enjoy prestige second to none. “Take the Congress. There are 85 writers among the 3,000 elected representatives.”

Politics aside, I want to know how a writer initially gets published, joins the Writer’s Union, makes contracts and earns a living. Do most writers use pen and paper? Does the paper shortage affect them? Beginning with the last question, he tells me that there is paper to write on although not always enough to publish books. Most writers type or get their manuscript typed by a typist. Word processors are rare, and the programs available lack a spelling check or a dictionary. As for breaking into print, the first step is acceptance by one of the “thick magazines,” publications such as Novy Mir or Ogonyok.

Books usually appear in serial form, and if they are well received, may be published later between hard covers. Getting an editor’s attention is a matter of a writer’s persistence and connections. There are, of course, no literary agents. Writers represent themselves. But of course friendship helps. The company of other writers is not only creatively stimulating but a practical necessity.

The logistics of publication are unchanged since Tolstoy’s day, Stabnikov believes. A writer presents a proposal to one of the dozen or so publishers in Moscow or Leningrad, gets a contract with an advance that is, in fact, his salary. Writers are paid per word, not by sales, and it is anyway impossible to know the sales figures of middle-level books. There are 7 million copies of “Children of the Arbat” in circulation (including the original thick magazine publication), apparently printed to satisfy demand, but the average print run is 15,000 copies, and only with a second printing will the author get more money. There are no royalties, no book market. Libraries are captives of the system, and the number of books printed seems to depend on whim. Moreover, Stabnikov points out, there is no way to know how well a book is selling. There is no mechanism, no computers, no way of gauging inventory and tracing the books.

One measure of success is the black market. If a novelist has only a few thousand books printed that sell for a couple of rubles, the same book may be available within days of distribution on the black market for many times the face price. One way to get rich off your own writing is to buy your own books as they appear and watch them inflate.

In Moscow, there is the Writers’ Union way, and then, as ever, there is another way. On a clear evening in daylight that stretches almost to midnight, I stroll along the Arbat, once the intellectual hub of Moscow where about 15 years ago bulldozers destroyed many well-loved buildings and produced Moscow’s only pedestrian mall. In this spring of heady freedom, there is the mood of Berkeley in the early ‘60s. Between poster shops and galleries closed for the night, soap- box orators attract small crowds. I listen to a Christian evangelist and a Hare Krishna. Knots of students drift from speaker to speaker, and when they hear American voices shyly open conversations. They want to know what we think about the Soviet Union, Moscow, glasnost and the Arbat. We ask what they think about China, the news of the massacre just leaking in via short-wave radio. But they are too caught up with what is happening inside the Kremlin to consider Tian An Men Square, about which there are only brief, official news clips.

Except for Yuri Ivanovich Gubar. He is a middle-aged, middle-sized man whom I notice standing beside a ledge where he is selling hand-typed poems for a ruble each. He tells me he is a plasma physicist on the faculty of Moscow University but also a poet manque. So he has decided to market his wares the way the new co-op restaurants are selling caviar, a practice for which he was chastised in a recent periodical by a critic appreciative of his poems but irate at him for making poetry a commodity, for “selling poetry, especially in the shadow of the Pushkin Museum.”

Gubar translated his poems freely for me, and I bought a few he had written during the first week in June:

Be it Tbilisi or Peking The results are the same. The cleansing of the square The killing of people.

And the day after Sakharov was shouted down in the Congress for mentioning war crimes in Afghanistan:

Sakharov should be blamed for the shortage of sugar.

. . . he is smiling sweetly. But where is the soap?

. . . he should be blamed for everything.

Ironic political verses of questionable quality. Do they reveal anything about the life of a Soviet writer? Though far from the elite in the Writer’s Union, Gubar, too, now has the freedom to criticize. The Congress may turn out to be, like the Arbat, a safety valve where the disenfranchised vent pent-up frustrations that, once voiced, will be ignored:

On the Arbat Street

Holler, and wild people will get together.

Because a fool hears

Another fool from afar.

Gubar’s fools are those who dare to see and tell the truth. Under glasnost, even fools and poets such as Gubar feel free to peddle their wares.