The Magical Chorus

Dovlatov had an adventurous life: very tall, dark, and handsome, resembling the actor Omar Sharif, he was drafted into the army and served as a guard at a labor camp in the north, then worked as a guide, journalist, and black marketeer. He drank a lot and brawled often, but in the meantime absorbing the ideas of liberalism and individualism, which were debated in the narrow circle of intellectuals that he entered. Brodsky was part of that crowd, and he later remarked that he and his friends back in the Soviet Union were in a certain sense “more American” than many actual ones.

Dovlatov, who had an innate journalistic talent and temperament, put his ideas into action in New York in 1980, founding the Russian-language weekly Novy Amerikanets [New American]. It did not last for long (the usual lack of funds), but it became a milestone in the history of free Russian journalism, primarily for its rejection of the obsolete methods of party polemics that Soviet emigres continued to use out of habit in the West.

A born editor, Dovlatov, together with the young literary critics Peter Vail and Alexander Genis, purged his weekly from dogmatic and crude anti-Sovietism, which he found just as revolting as the pro-Soviet sermons in the media back in Russia. Dovlatov said with a shrug: “Fanatics have amazingly similar arguments, whether they’re pro or contra.” When a writer offered to cover the opening of a flower show “from an anti-communist position,” Dovlatov replied, “Write it without any positions.” His unorthodox stance upset many conservative emigres and he was even accused of being a KGB agent.

After Novy Amerikanets, Dovlatov found himself at the New York bureau of Radio Liberty, where the essayist Boris Paramonov was already working. Vail and Genis soon followed. A small group of like-minded people formed at the bureau, which I later joined.

Those were happy days. The Liberty offices at 1775 Broadway were dominated by the gigantic, exotic figure of Dovlatov, who dropped sarcastic jokes and memorable bon mots; it was impossible to resist his charm, even if you did not agree with him. His radio scripts made him famous in the Soviet Union. His prose came harder to him; he wrote slowly, meticulously shaping every sentence. Even though he insisted that he was only a storyteller, he strove for an unreachable perfection, collapsing into frequent alcoholic binges. He died of a heart attack after one in August 1990, ten days before his forty-ninth birthday. After his death, the Dovlatov circle at Radio Liberty inevitably fell apart.

Aksyonov gave an ironic account of the effect of Western broadcasts on the life of the Soviet elite. At the writers’ colonies, resorts for the privileged “creative workers,” if you walked down the hallway in the evening “you couldn’t help hearing from almost every room the twitter of transatlantic swallows. After listening, the writers came out into the fresh air to exchange news.”⁷ According to Aksyonov, “The persistent and active existence of some alternative lifted the spirits in the society of a permanent bad mood.”⁸ Yet, the broadcasts with their persistent prodemocratic and proliberal message annoyed a lot of people.

The negative reaction of the Communist leadership was predictable: the very existence of Western radio voices addressed to the Soviet Union was seen as a real threat. The boss of the Soviet secret services, Andropov, speaking at a Central Committee Plenum on April 27, 1973, indignantly quoted an American supervisor at Radio Liberty who told a KGB source: “We can’t take over the Kremlin, but we can bring up people who can, and we can prepare the conditions that will make it possible.”⁹

Andropov maintained that the alternative cultural figures promoted by Western radio, like Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, “no matter how loudly they shout about them, are nothing but the dregs of society who do not make weather. But since the Western ideologues have nothing better, they have to fuss over these rejects.”¹⁰ At the same time, Solzhenitsyn, who had moved to the United States by then, complained that American radio “for several years banned quoting Solzhenitsyn,” stopped broadcasting The Gulag Archipelago to Russia, and instead wasted precious time on “an incredible amount of piffle” like jazz and pop music. “Even worse, they find time to broadcast a ‘hobby’ show…. That’s completely horrible!”¹¹

Solzhenitsyn’s opinion amazingly matched the official Soviet line when he warned that the Western broadcasts will “cause revulsion, nothing but indignation, in the Soviet listener, who will turn off the radio and never listen again.”¹²

There was another point on which Solzhenitsyn’s complaints coincided with that of the Soviet authorities. The writer was unhappy that “news about the Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union is given incommensurable space.”¹³ In 1981, the same year that Solzhenitsyn made these remarks in an NBC interview, Ivan Artamonov’s book Weapon of the Doomed (A Systemic Analysis of Ideological Diversion) was published in the Soviet Union. It explained that in the United States “Zionists controlled half the radio stations (including Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe) and magazines, and three-fourths of all foreign bureaus of American newspapers, magazines, and press agencies.”¹⁴

This attitude toward Radio Liberty and other Western radio stations as organizations under Jewish control and oriented “on the breakup and total destruction of Russia as a state and Russians as a nation”¹⁵ survived the fall of the Soviet regime with its propaganda myths and continues to dominate the discourse in Russian nationalist cultural circles today.

In the speech cited earlier, Andropov assured the Party leadership: “The KGB is implementing an entire complex of measures to suppress various forms of ideological diversion, to break up foreign ideological centers and to compromise them.”¹⁶ Until the secret archives are open, it would be difficult to gauge the involvement of the Soviet secret agencies in fanning divisions among new emigres. The fact is, there were plenty of conflicts based on political, aesthetic, and simply personal disagreements.

The two Russian Nobel laureates in literature did not get along in exile. Solzhenitsyn rebuked Brodsky in The New York Times Book Review for his poetic vocabulary being limited to urban intelligentsia usage and lacking deep folk roots.¹⁷ Brodsky, when I brought up Solzhenitsyn in a conversation, merely shrugged: “Well, I don’t feel like talking about that gentleman.”¹⁸ Solzhenitsyn also questioned in print Sinyavsky’s Christianity, calling him “the main Aesthete.”¹⁹ Sinyavsky responded with a swipe at Solzhenitsyn: “This all smells too much of Tartuffe, blasphemy, and the anti- Christ.”²⁰

Voinovich published his satirical novel Moscow 2042, which included a funny caricature of Solzhenitsyn, called Sim Simych Karnavalov in the book. Solzhenitsyn, who was already called the “Russian Ayatollah Khomeini” by some liberal observers, took umbrage: Voinovich, he claimed, had depicted him unfairly as a “terribly scary leader of looming Russian nationalism.” Aksyonov, in his novel Say Cheese!, took a jab at Brodsky and complained to everyone that Brodsky tried to prevent the American publication of Aksyonov’s masterpiece, the novel The Burn, which Brodsky, in turn, described as “written with a mop.”²¹ Sinyavsky called the influential emigre journal Kontinent, which was edited by Vladimir Maximov in France (and published with American money), “the Paris regional Party committee.” Maximov told everyone that Sinyavsky collaborated with the KGB. And so on, and so forth.

If the KGB took pleasure in these intra-emigre arguments, it was in vain. Such open disagreements did not have a seriously detrimental effect on the emigres’ authority, either inside the Soviet Union, or in the West, where every faction had influential allies and patrons, who considered political debate a normal and healthy democratic process.