Lost allusions

Thinking further about my yesterday's experience I realise that another reason for my emotional disturbance is an acute sense of lost allusions, the lack of common cultural ground, the paucity of mother-tongue immersion. I have in all these years deliberately avoided Russian diaspora, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Russian emigrants of all generations have been suspicious of each other; I have heard slander about most of my former compatriots, and I can just imagine what has been said – perhaps is being said – about me behind my back. In every Russian diaspora there are factions and groups; in Stockholm there are several Russian Orthodox parishes that don't recognise each other; there are mutually exclusive societies and associations. I never wanted to be part of it so I preferred not to join. Then, as any diaspora, it is highly heterogeneous, and I see no point in socialising with anyone merely because we happen to come from the same country, but with whom I wouldn't socialise back in Russia. Also I made a point of becoming personally and professionally integrated in Sweden, in all things Swedish. It never occurred to me to get involved with the Slavic department, because I had never been a Slavic scholar and had neither interest nor competence to become one. I did attend Slavic conferences and other events, but only when topics interested me for my own professional goals. I also tried to become involved in various communities, from the parish to charity work to Swedish Institute for Cultural Exchange, and abandoned those for various reasons.

The gains are obvious: I would have never been where I am now if I hadn't invested in my professional career. But the losses only became clear to me obliquely. I would go back to Russia to speak Russian and to immerse into what had been my element since I was a child: intellectual talk with common denominators, where allusions didn't have to be spelled out. As years went by I started to notice that I wasn't any longer atuned to my friends' framework of mind. I didn't understand their references; sometimes, their language felt alien. I wasn't able to keep up with new literature, new thinking, new worldview, new gossip. I wasn't one of the gang anymore. Some of my Slavic scholar friends caught up and passed me in their knowledge of contemporary Russia. For them, it was their study object. I could never make my country of origin a study object. And I had to keep up with my own study objects.

The allusions got irretrievably lost. There is no point throwing out literary quotations if your conversation partners have no idea what you are talking about. You cannot explain every joke. Finally, you give up. I have read about emigrants who forgot their mother tongue, or perhaps suppressed it. I hope I haven't quite forgotten Russian although I have fewer and fewer occasions to speak it, and sometimes I ask myself whether I should persist at all. I even speak to myself in my two other languages. I read Russian literature, classic and modern, but I cannot write professionally. So much of my grown-up vocabulary has developed in the other languages.

What happened yesterday was a rare occasion of shared allusions. Everybody laughed together, everybody recognised and remembered (I am sure there were people who didn't, but we can ignore them). I was brutally and painfully reminded of my voluntary isolation, of severed ties, of my cultural luggage that will die with me, unclaimed.

A voice from the past

I am not sure what I had expected.

But I know I had been apprehensive ever since Staffan told me about it, a couple of months ago. I had been pretending it wasn't happening. I was afraid to be disappointed.

Many, many years ago in a far away galaxy my father told me to go and see a documentary. Documentaries are typically not on teenagers' priority lists, but he insisted because it was a documentary about music, called Seven tones in a silence. It was seven short documentary snippets about various musical phenomena. One of them was a young man of Asian origin who sang pirate songs on board of a fishing boat off Kamchatka. This man was the reason my father wanted me to watch the film.

It was our first encounter with Yuli Kim. At that time, we all loved Bulat Okudzjava, and some of us loved other underground bards, and Kim soon became famous. He had returned from Kamchatka where he served his mandatory three years of teaching after his teacher certificate, and he taught in a school just around the corner from my school. He wrote songs for movies, and that's how my father got to know him.

The time was bad, and he got caught in a dissident movement. He lost his job, but continued writing for films under pseudonym. Then, in 1968, he and my father collaborated on a musical version of As You Like It. I was sixteen and a political idealist. I hated the regime. The performance of As You Like It alluded to the regime. Kim's songs emphasised the satire. My father brought news from rehearsals every day. Yesterday this song was cut. Today, this authentic Shakespeare monologue was considered by the censors too subversive. I went to the dress researsal. Half of Kim's songs had been forbidden. Partly because they were potentially subversive, partly because he was a non-person, pseudonym or not. But we had them all recorded on our antedeluvial tape recorder. I knew them all by heart. I still know them all by heart. The play opened and was quickly closed down. For me, it will always remain a symbol of Art against Tyranny.

My father and Kim did some more musicals together. He would come and sing, and my father would record, then orchestrate. There were more banned songs. They were wonderful songs, witty, clever, beautifully crafted, filled to the brim with literary and musical allusions. I shared them with friends. A new song by Kim was an event. You could be sentenced to five years in a labour camp for singing, listening, sharing or just keeping a tape.

I moved to Sweden, but when I went back to visit there would be theatre performances with Kim's songs. And he would come and sing at my parents'. Once, I remember, he met my daughter, two years old. He asked her what her name was. She said, in Russian, “Yulya”. He laughted: “My name is also Yulya” (that's Russian gender-neutral endearments for you). In the tape recorded that everning, you can hear Julia's eager two-year-old voice in pauses: “Sing more!”

One of the last times I was in Moscow, Kim knew I was in the audience at his concert – by that time, he was a famous performer, finally acknowledged by the authorities. He dedicated the performance of a song to me, a song called “Poor Masha” (actually a political song about Andrei Sakharov).

Because I know so many of Kim's songs by heart I often sing them to myself. I always sing them when I am rowing at the gym – very powerful.

Anyway, here I am, in Cambridge, twice removed from my home town and a million years away from my sixteen-year-old self. I am in a church in Victoria Street. I am shaking. I see him alone in a corner. I approach him and say: “Hello, Yulya, I am Masha”. He looks at me. We embrace. I don't want to disturb him before the performance, but he comes and sits by me and Staffan, and we talk theatre, music, politics and grandchildren.

Then he sings all those songs, and there is no church in Victoria Street, no Cambridge, no forty-five years in between. Has someone from my past miraculoulsy reached me in my present? Have I miralulously moved back to my past?

I don't know how to describe it. It is not just hearing your teenage idol, forty-five years later, live. It is someone who used to come to dinner. And after the concert, and before he is attacked by people asking for autographs, he comes to me to say goodbye.

Undergraduate memories, part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The old Soviet Union was a country where everything was prohibited and anything was possible. There was always a way to circumvent the rules. In my case, I had a fake employment as a private secretary. Certain categories of Soviet citizens who were more equal than other citizens, for instance, members of the Writers' Union, were allowed to employ secretaries, and this is how I could switch over to evening classes, produce an employment certificate every term and do as I pleased. Actually, I wouldn't have minded at all to work as a secretary and earn some money, but it wasn't part of the deal.

My remaining four undergraduate years were dire. Looking back, I cannot remember one single inspiring instructor or a subject I was interested in. Pedagogy, Psychology, Theoretical Phonetics came and went. Honestly, I have no idea what they were about. The only valuable knowledge I ever got from my formal education was General Linguistics, and my professor remains the only bright spot in my memory. (Many years later I met her in Washington D.C. at a get-together of Fulbright scholars. She remembered me and my phonemic distinctions).

So what did I do with my time? I didn't sleep until noon, and I wasn't a partying type. I got up in the morning and studied until it was time to go to bed. I studied Swedish, and later also Norwegian, Danish and Dutch. I read everything I could get hold of: novels, magazines, cookbooks. I went to the Foreign Literature Library and read books on history, geography, culture and art. I had a huge box of index cards on which I wrote down authors' names and book titles, historical events with dates, facts and fictions. I had notebooks in which I wrote lists with English, Swedish and German names of animals, birds, insects, plants, body parts, metals, gases, tools, utensils, textiles – my homemade encyclopedias. It was in the Stone Age, before the internet. But it was also behind the Iron curtain, with no access to dictionaries, encyclopedias or any other sources of information. I had to do with what was available. There was enough for a lifetime.

I must have been lonely, but I have no memories of being lonely or unhappy. My former fellow students had classes in daytime, and my new fellow students worked. I didn't have many people to talk to. When I reflect on it now, it must have been weird. I was like a solitary mediaeval scholar, surrounded by books, scribbling down notes.

There was a brief and intensive period of flanerie when I, together with two bohemian friends, spent days upon days walking around in the city, going to museums and amusement parks, taking a river boat or a night-time bus, talking, smoking, playing cards, reciting poetry. There were very few coffee shops in Moscow, but these few we frequented. It was a happy time.

Sometimes I made plans to go to Leningrad where the University had a strong Scandinavian department. I even thought about going to Tartu in Estonia and study semiotics with Yuri Lotman. But these were sandcastles, for I felt comfortable with my life and didn't think beyond graduation.

Very soon I started writing book reviews and small articles for money, and eventually I started translating. Nobody ever asked me for any certificate or diploma, and nobody questioned my knowledge and skills.

At the time, I did not reflect on whether I regretted my wrong choices. Today, forty years later, I do. I should have chosen an education with challenges, inspiring teachers, enthusiastic fellow students, intellectual climate. On the other hand, I turned out quite well after all; there is nothing wrong with my erudition, and although my professional career has been bumpy and thorny, I cannot complain about the outcome.

Undergraduate memories, part 2

Read the beginning of the story of wrong choices.

I knew from the first day that I had made a wrong choice, that it was wrong education for me. I was passionate about general linguistics, and everything that I learned from that course has been useful throughout my career. I loved Latin that most of my fellow students hated. I liked American History and Society. History of the Communist Party and Scientific Atheism were inescapable, I would have had it anywhere. I quite enjoyed military training: we were trained to be military interpreters and would exit with a lieutenant grade in addition to BA, but in the first year it was general military education. I liked the rigorous learning it implied, and I even liked assembling Kalashnikovs (we were taken to a shooting range just once) and playing with portable radios. I liked map-drawing.

But my major subject was a disapppoinment. I had attended an elite school with focus on English, and in the last year we used textbooks for second-year university courses. I had read scores of English novels. I could make long conversations and recite poetry. Here, we were subjected to “correction” and “remediation” as if we were beginners, and indeed, the level of many of my fellow students was appallingly low. We were sent to the language lab to listen to and repeat long and short vowels. We were not allowed to talk, and we had to read To Kill a Mockingbird in an abridged version. We were told to forget everything we had learned in school. We were failed in tests so that we would know our place.

I joined a student drama club and a “young scholars' society” where I could do more general linguistics, and I even gave a paper at a student conference on the totally fascinating subject of phonemic distinctions in English and German. I was obsessed by phonemic distinctions. I also started taking private lessons of Swedish. After her first chock over my defiance settled, my mother told me that an English degree wouldn't take me anywhere; everybody had an English degree; if I insisted on doing modern languages rather than solid philology I could at least take a more exotic language. At the Institute, we would study another language, but not until the third year, and if it was on the same level as English, it wouldn't be much to long for. So my mother decided that a Scandinavian language was reasonably exotic, and it so happened that the first private tutor she found offered Swedish. It could have been Norwegian, Danish or Icelandic, and who knows where that would have taken me.

In the Institute, we had language classes in groups of ten, and my group was rebellious because we found language labs and abridged Mockingbirds ridicuous and said so. Halfway though the year, our group was dismantled, and we were dispatched to different groups. Based on my previous performance, I ended up in the strongest group of my year, with slightly more challenges and really good teachers. But by the end of the second term, my mother came up with a new idea. I had by then admitted that I wasn't getting an education, merely a degree which I needed to get a job; I was educating myself as much as I could by reading, but my classes, three double-hours six days a week, took far too much time from my precious autodidactic activity, my mother said. I should switch to the evening programme. It would be just three evenings a week, with my days fully dedicated to serious studies. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that he never allowed schooling to interfere with his education?

The problem was that you could only enroll in the evening programme if you were employed at least part-time, and that seemed counter-productive to the idea of home-schooling. But of course my mother had something else in mind.

To be continued.

Undergraduate memories

These days, it's forty years since I got my first degree. I am not particularly proud of this part of my professional career, and I don't think I ever told anyone about it properly, except in passing in my memoir. It wasn't important, but forty years later it is interesting to look back and see how some decisions turned out to be life-changing. As they usually do.

During my two last years in school I worked hard toward my grades and took extra private lessons because that was what you did if you wanted a higher education. My parents expected me to apply to the Faculty of Philology at Moscow University because literature had always been my favourite subject (hideous teachers notwithstanding). It was enormously competitive, and apart from excellent grades from school you had to take four entrance exams: written composition, oral literature, English (as a foreign language) and history. Written composition was easiest to fail: the examiner could always state that the argument wasn't sufficiently developed. Most of my classmates had “connections”. It meant either that your parents knew someone high in the college administration or that they knew someone who could be bribed. It was a truth universally acknowledged that you could not be accepted into college without connections. My parents had no connections. I still don't know whether they genuinely had no connections or whether they stood above it, but I was expected to get in without connections, and they would be disappointed if I failed. I was a well-behaved girl, used to do as I was told. If I were told to pass entrance exams then that's was what I had to do.

Eventually, my parents found a remote connection at the Faculty of Philology and sent me in for “consultation”. The professor made me read and translate a passage from an English novel. There was one word I didn't know. Forty-five years later, I still remember the shame of it. The word was “pace”. I could answer all questions and discuss the passage fluently, and the professor was highly encouraging, but I realised that I would never pass the exam without knowing the word “pace”, and then my family would denounce me, and my friends would despise me, and the only way for me would be to take my life. Although I, like most teenagers, had repeatedly contemplated suicide, the prospect wasn't appealing. I was scared. I admit it: I was a coward. I was scared of my parents' scorn, because they had always been brilliant in everything and would tolerate nothing else from me.

After the school finals – eleven exams, half of them in subjects I would never ever use again – I prepared my paperwork, including the special recommendation from my literature teacher (the horrid one) stating that I was the leader of a reading club that had never existed. Actually, the recommendation started – and I remember it word for word, after forty-five years: “There is no writer in the world, not even a third-rate one, that she doesn't know”. I wasn't supposed to see the recommendation, but my principal who was known for breaking rules showed it to me with an amused smile.

My parents went away for holidays. They were not like other parents who cooked their kids' favourite food for them, made their beds and turned down the radio while the kids were revising for exams. My parents had confidence in me. They went away for holidays, leaving me alone to take the decisive step toward my adult life. I thought already then it was strange, but it wasn't my habit to question my parents' behaviour. Looking back at those weeks, I assume they left me some money for food, but I have no memory of it. I couldn't cook then, and there were no eateries in Moscow in the late 60s. So I guess I had bread and cheese three times a day. I don't remember feeling lonely, but I must have been. All my classmates were revising, most likely at their family country houses, because I have no memories of revising together with a friend. I had a lover, but that's another story.

I was a coward. I knew I could not fail my parents' expectations, and I knew there was no way I could pass exams at the Faculty of Philology without connections. So I took my paperwork and applied to the Foreign Languages Institute, a prestigious school, but one my parents despised, and I did too. Looking back, I don't understand why I thought that getting into FLI without connections would be easier. I am sure that if my parents had been by my side I wouldn't have done it, and my life would have been completely different. Or maybe not at all. Sometimes we ascribe more significance to our decisions than they deserve.

I passed my entrance exams and went to join my parents at the holiday resort. I don't remember their reaction when I confessed. I know they were terribly disappointed, but I cannot remember exactly what they said. Maybe they didn't say anything. My mother had a habit of not talking to me for weeks. Yet what was the point of talking or fighting: it was over and done with, all because I didn't know the word “pace”.

To be continued.

Writing First World War for children, part 2

Another reflection I made at the First World War symposium was that my grandchildren presumably don't know anything about it.

Of course, I didn't know much about it when I was a child, once again, because it was totally eclipsed by the 1917 revolution and the subsequent Communist coup that eventually harvested more lives than the Great War on both sides – but our history books didn't tell us about it. Our history books told us that the war was instigated by world imperialism, and it was a blessing for Russia that it finished off the Russian empire and established paradise on earth.

I don't know what my Swedish grandchildren's history books tell them about the Great War. Probably a short paragraph with a blurry black-and-white picture explaining that somewhere, far away, there was a war that Sweden did not participate in. Sweden had its own problems then. It was an impoverished country, and a third of its population had emigrated. That story takes many pages in the history books. I guess it's inevitable, because history is always written from a particular perspective, and what is major for one history writer is a footnote for another. Yet being a displaced hedgehog, I cannot help asking myself: can I do something to make my grandchildren aware of the Great War that did not affect their forefathers? And do I want to? Why would they care? And then I think about red poppies, and the war monuments by the Cambridge railway station and in our little village, and lists of perished soldiers in King's Chapel, and yes, I want my grandchildren to know about it, just as I want British children to know about it. And history books won't help. You need the power of fiction to get the message across. Or rather, get the feeling across.

And this is why I have sent copies of War Horse to my grandchildren and encouraged their parents to take them to see the film. And I will read the books that I learned about at the symposium and see whether I want my grandchildren to read them.

Most of all, I wish somebody would write a book about a Swedish child who by serendipity gets caught in the Great War. 

Childhood reading, part 2: Stories of long ago

For the previous post click here.

One of the most important books in my early childhood was transgenerational: our parents grew up with it and passed it on to us, for who knows what reasons, because it was profoundly obsolete by the time I read it. It was origibally published in 1939. But I think we all loved it despite and not because. It was called What I Saw and was a fictionalised, narrativised encyclopedia for a young Soviet citizen. The storyline was a young boy who travels with his mother from a little provincial town to Moscow to see the marvels of the new Communist state. It is told in first-person, naïve voice, with fully developed defamiliarisation, presenting the world a new and exciting. As I see now, it was a remarkably upper-class story given its propagandist agenda: first-class railway sleeper, luxury hotel and other details which, with the knowledge of poverty and terror of the times when it was written feels disgustingly hypocritical. But of course I didn't reflect on these things when I was a child. All the information the book offered, all the horisons it opened, and the lovable character! The only thing that disturbed me was the character's name, Alyosha. Since the cover clearly stated that the author's name was Boris I could not get around the fact that he called himself Alyosha. It sounded unnatural and false. There is research on young children's problems with deixis, and I am a good example. I hated books told in first person in which the author pretended to be someone else. Since What I Saw had an ambivalent fictional status it contributed to my confusion.

I generally had issues with names because although some books I liked had protagonists named Masha, I was uncomfortable about the ownership of my name. It is a very common name, and there were several namesakes among my friends and classmates, but I always felt that a fictional character had appropriated my name and somehow exposed me to the world, in a false identity. One of the favourite books was called About the girl Masha, the dog Cockerel and the cat Thread (it doesn't sound half as awkward in Russian), written by one of the major poets of the Russian avant-guard, Alexander Vvedensky. I didn't know it then of course, and I learned it by mere chance, because sources interested in the avant-guard don't take children's books into account. And it wasn't an avant-guard book, but a very artless, warm story about this five-year-old girl, Masha, and her father the pilot, her mother the painter, her brother and her pets. The main conflict of the story is that the mother gets ill and must change climate for the winter so Masha travels to the Black Sea and makes some new friends. Again, for a book published in 1937 it is rather idyllic.

I have done what we ask our students to do. I have re-read the book. (It is available online). Of course, I cried floods. It all came back to me, the words, the mental images, the sounds, the taste of milk and the smell of the summer meadow. I can see why this book is still in print. I wish I had read it to my children. It is a kind book, unpretentious, simple – in the best sense of the word. It has humour, and it does not talk down to the reader. And something I had forgotten: Masha is a poet. I was a poet too when I was five. I could connect to it. I could also connect to Masha being teased with a rhyme: “Masha – kasha” (porridge). I now remember that I envied Masha because she had a dog and a cat.

Old Hags' Day

Tomorrow is the International Women's Day, another holiday I do not celebrate. Women's Day once a year, and the rest are men's days?

Many years ago I was asked to speak at the International Women's Day manifestation in Stockholm, to tell my poor oppressed sisters about the liberated women of the Soviet Union. I could not make the date, so I didn't have to explain to my oppressed sister how wrong she was in her perceptions. Women in the Soviet Union had to work full-time to make ends meet AND do all the house work on top of it, because men would never do a thing in the house, but once a year they were expected to give their wives a bunch of flowers and a bottle of perfume. After that, they had an extra occasion to get drunk because it was a holiday. The day after, they took an extra holiday to treat the hangover.

In school, Women's Day was about female teachers. At home, it was about mothers and grandmothers, a variant of Mother's Day. In my family, we did not celebrate it. We made the most of it being a holiday and went skiing.

At my workplace in Moscow, the union – which was just another administrative structure, nothing like a real union – had funds to give every female employee a present. After a couple of years of paper doilies and plastic pins, we asked for cash. The male union reps took a sigh of relief.

If there was anything political in Women's Day it was about oppressed women in the capitalist world who needed our solidarity. We didn't care about oppressed women in the capitalist world because we had enough of our own problems. When feminist movement started in Russia after the fall of communism, the highest point on the agenda was every woman's right to stay at home and take care of her family. 

Fortunately, Staffan never tried to honour me on Women's Day. I would have been deeply offended.

My wonderful great-aunt used to say, when greeted on Women's Day: “I am not a woman, I am a librarian”. Rather than Women's Day, I'd celebrate a Hug-a-Librarian Day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

Virtually Russian

A couple of years ago I carelessly promised to go to Moscow for a guest lecture. It's a bad habit I must get rid of: when people invite me to come and do a guest lecture, I feel flattered and say: I'll be delighted, instead of: Sorry, I truly cannot. Apart from painful travel, I have a complicated relationship to my birthplace, but at some point going to Moscow to do a guest lecture and then see all Rabbit's friends and relations felt attractive. It got less and less attractive as the date approached, and since I was then - as always - desperately cancelling all previously arranged travel I took a deep breath and emailed my Russian colleague to give my apology. By that time, another colleague in Germany had suggested that I do a virtual lecture if I couldn't come in person, and I suggested to my Russian colleague that I do a virtual lecture for them, secretly hoping that it would turn out impossible. However, she was delighted, and the date went on approaching. Actually, it was brought forward by two months, so suddenly last week I realised that I was going to give a virtual lecture in my mothertongue which I hadn't spoken academically for decades. (I used to go to Russia and lecture a lot, but not for a long while now. I always liked it. It took me to exotic places such as Murmansk).

I insisted on a technical test in advance because there are thousands of things that can go wrong. I had a test for my German lecture, and it worked fine, and then it didn't at the actual lecture. At least, not at once.

The test went fine, but I did it from home, while I wanted to do the lecture from the office where I was sure that my end worked as it should. I asked to have a final test half an hour before the lecture. When I opened my Skype this morning the Russian contact was not there, and I didn't quite remember their Skype name. I tried this and that, which didn't work, and then I hoped they would send a contact request, and they didn't, and I emailed them, and I tried some more Skype names, and finally one was correct. Perfect. Close encounters of fourth grade. Well, I said, see you in fifteen minutes. My Russian colleague wriggled and said, could we possibly start five minutes past so that the audience got in. I had no problems with that and looked through my notes. They called five past to ask whether we could make it ten past since there were more people coming in. Finally a quarter past we started, and I forgot my notes and made some jokes (which is weird in a virtual classroom since I couldn't see the audience's reaction). Halfway through, the connection broke. My contact went offline, and there wasn't much I could do about it. I got an emal saying: Sorry, we are fixing it, which I had already figured out. Then it worked again, and I had to ask them what the last thing they had heard me say was. I had a big alarm clock in front of me, but because of the delayed start and the interruption I allowed myself to go over a bit. Then there were questions and comments, all very clever and helpful, and I had forgotten that I had spoken a language I wasn't comfortable with. I enjoyed it. I want to do it again.

Book of the month: Oblomov

After dozens of young adult dystopias of dubious quality my mind craved something slow and peaceful, so I rummaged through my bookshelves and took out Goncharov's Oblomov. Some people say that it is the best Russian nineteenth-century novel, and after I have re-read it again, I think I agree. It's not half as famous as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or even Turgenev, but it has qualities none of these have.

We had to read it in school, when I was fifteen, and even though there was plenty of love the rest was boring, almost as boring as the war bits in War and Peace. From my vantage point it's almost criminal to make or even encourage kids to read books they cannot appreciate. I read War and Peace when I was thirteen - what did I understand? With Oblomov, we learned in school that he was an example of degraded Russian upper class that oppressed peasants and was doomed to die out.

Many years later, in Sweden, I was asked to teach a course in classic Russian literature in my department, Comparative Literature, not for Slavic students. As I was selecting required reading I decided to give Oblomov a chance, because all sources mentioned it as a great novel. And yes, it was great. And my students liked it, all 600 pages of it. And we had great discussions.

Then I wrote about it in my postdoc comparative-semiotic project on Swedish and Russian literature. I compared Oblomov with Gösta Berling. Both are good-for-nothing, and both are in passing described in their respective novels as poets, although neither has written a line of poetry.They are themselves embodied poetry.

This was a very long time ago, and when I re-read the book now, I read it very slowly, savouring every word of this magnificent prose. I had of course forgotten most of it, including the fact that Oblomov has a child. No man or woman can be said to have lived in vain if they have a child. I was also reading, although I tried very hard not to, through my new professional eyeglasses, through empathy and cognitive engagement. Yet twenty years ago I already asked myself: if Oblomov is so depraved, why do we like him? Why does Olga love him? Why does Stolz love him? Why does his servant love him? Why does his landlady love him? Why is this good-for-nothing so immensely lovable? Why do I feel real pain reading about him? (Ok, cogntitive poetics can describe it all by mirror neurons, but that's not the point).

And then I noticed a detail that I had missed on all previous readings. I have always been curious about sexual life of classic novel males. There are secondary characters who have mistresses, go to prostitutes or have fun with maids. But the romantic hero is immaculate. This has always felt implausible. Oblomov is thirty two in the beginning of the novel. Virgin? Rich, upper-class male? No way. But of course nineteenth-century authors would not provide any information about their heroes' sexual experience. So I thought. But just because I read very, very slowly, I caught a phrase in the middle of one of Oblomov's many self-flagellating monologues. He says that he has wasted his life, neglected his property, spent half of his income on Mina... wait a minute... who is Mina? She is never mentioned again, but obviously she used to be important enough to spend half an income on. Mina is not a Russian name so the lady in question was a foreigner. An actress? A governess? An expensive cocotte? This little clause throws a whole new light on Oblomov. Was he as obsessed about Mina as Swann about Odette? What happened? It is beyond the page, and fictional characters have no life beyond the page, but for some reason the author decided that this detail was important.

I am sure Slavic scholars have published articles on the mysterious Mina, and there are a couple of PhD theses written about her. But I have just discovered her. She does not feature in Oblomov's dreams or memories. But somewhere deep inside she is omnipresent.

When I make discoveries like this, I wonder how much else I miss in my reading.

First day of school

Today is the first of September, which in my childhood was, and as far as I know still is in Russia, the first day of school. The scene of so many children's books: dramatic, full of hope and fear. Suddenly, when I think back, I realise that I missed on it. I never experienced the first day of school, except vicariously, through literature. My mother believed that school was unavoidable evil and the longer you could avoid it the better. There was a trend at the time so send kids to school as late as possible, which was fatal since you were then the oldest in your class, and that's just as good a reason to be bullied as any other. By seven, when school normally started in Russia, I could read fluently and had already self-published my Collected Works of prose, poetry and drama – in tiny booklets made of typewriter sheets that I pinched from my parents, neatly printed and illustrated. For some reason though my mother and my best friend's mother decided to keep us away from school for another year, and we came back from holiday ten days into September. It turned out that my friend's mother had changed her mind, and there was my best friend, a schoolgirl in uniform, with a school bag full of books, notebooks and pencils, and I, a nobody. Fortunately, my parents realised what a disaster it would have been and managed to get me into the same school. It wasn't easy because it was a very popular school, and there were already forty-five pupils in every class in my year (yes, you heard correctly, forty-five kids and one teacher). I can imagine that my grandfather promised the principal to donate a discarded piano from Moscow Conservatory of which he was Vice Chancellor; and I also remember that my mother gave lectures in art history to final-year pupils. That was quite normal in Russia.

So, hastily, I was equipped with a uniform, a school bag, pencils, pens, pen wipers (does anyone remember what pen wipers were?), and was dispatched off to school. Somebody must have taken me the first day, but I don't remember who it was, possibly the maid. And there I was, luckily with another newcomer, a boy, with whom I shared a desk at the far end of the classroom. The desk had an inkwell with horrible, diluted violet ink that tilted dangerously. Everything was slightly dangerous and unfamiliar: bells, breaks, lunch, stand up when called. My best friend sat in the front and already knew all the rules.

I don't think I was bullied more for starting late than I would have been otherwise. Throughout primary school I was kept at home once a week, ostensibly because of my poor health. You aren't popular for such things. I was also a top student, with straight As and all prizes at the end of each year. I wore glasses. I played the piano. I was bad at sports. I loved primary school because I had the most wonderful teacher in the world. In secondary, life became harder, but I emerged from it and have done quite well since then. And who knows what my life would have been if I did start school on the first of September like everybody else.

Tenacious myths

I was interviewed by the Swedish Radio today. Well, I wasn't really interviewed the way I had expected after the researcher's conversation yesterday when I said what I thought on the matter. Apparently the program leader hadn't listened to her researcher.

The subject was something I have been interviewed about extensively in the past thirty years, in oral and written form, formally and informally, by journalists and undergrad students, and during drinks and table conversations. I say the same thing every time.

The eternal subject is the popularity of Astrid Lindgren's character Karlsson-on-the-roof in Russia.

What I say is that whoever asks is terribly ethnocentric. It is understandable that Swedish people are fascinated that something from their culture is popular abroad, but this Karlsson myth is blown up out of proportion. Yes, he has always been popular. Almost as popular as Alice in Wonderland, Thumbelina, Winnie-the-Pooh and the Little Prince. And dozens of other children's literature characters, homegrown and translated. To say that Karlsson was uniquely popular is to close your eyes on the context. And when people ask why Karlsson and not any other Lindgren character, the simple answer is: because it was available in Russian. Many, many years before Pippi Longstocking.

Another truth is that Karlsson became still more popular after two Russian cartoons were produced, and then two picturebooks based on cartoons. In these, the profound and sad story of the original was boiled down to Tom-and-Jerry-like slapstick. There was nothing left of Astrid Lindgren's text and nothing of Ilon Wikland's original illustrations. So in fact people in Russia don't really know Lindgren's character, but something twice removed. And there has been a lot of merchandise: dolls, candy, towels, mugs. There were funny stories too, some of them quite rude. Journalists interpret these as a sign of exceptional popularity. But stories are told in Russia about almost anything, including popular literary characters. Lots of rude stories about Thumbelina. Lots of rude stories about Pinocchio. Lots of rude stories about Winnie-the-Pooh. Who, by the way, also transformed into a cartoon character – Russian, not Disney – which made him more popular and better known than the original.

And then people say that Karlsson was controversial in Russia – not more controversial than any good children's book is any culture, certainly not more than Karlsson or Pippi were in Sweden. Personally I have always dislikes Karlsson as a character because he is mean, but I still like the books because they say some essential things about being a child. I wonder if the journalist who interviewed me today understands it. The Karlsson books are not about Karlsson, they are about the child who must learn what it means to be a human being. Karlsson is not human (he is in fact an early post-human, with technologically augmented capacities), but the child is. You are not supposed to like Karlsson, you are supposed to hate him. Or make mock of him.

The reason the Karlsson books – not just Karlsson the character - became popular in Russia is that they are great books by a great writer. They joined other great books read by generations of Russian children, which included unacknowledged imitations of Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz and Dr Dolittle. They happened to be translated in Russia at the time there weren't as many great books for children as there are today.

To ask why Karlsson is popular is like asking why Harry Potter is popular. Especially if it comes to a country where very few great children's books are available.

I didn't have a chance to say all this to the journalist today. She had her own opinion and wasn't listening. So the Karlsson myth will now be perpetuated through yet another medial channel.

Interesting facts from individual Russian history, part 3

The final part of the story of my Grossmama Maria (part 1 and part 2)

For the rest of the world, the second World War started in 1939. In the Soviet Union, it started on June 22, 1941 and was called the Great Patriotic War. Within a couple of weeks, all Germans in every city, town and villages in Russia were told that they would be deported. They were told it was for their own protection and that they would be able to come back once the war was over. Jonathan and Maria lived in a German village in the Caucasus, together with a huge group of relatives, nephews and their families. They were herded together and taken by a freight boat across the Caspian Sea, and from there they were to go by railway. They knew that they were going into death. But they did not despair. The family chronicle says that they sat on deck in rain and storm, like cattle, and suddenly one of the nephews said: "Uncle Jonathan, can you please sing something?" And Jonathan stood up and sand Mephistopheles' aria, which was his special hit.

Then they were put in the infamous cattle car to be transported further eastward. But Jonathan got very sick and had to be carried into the car. Three days later he died and was buried in a mass grave at a little railway station, together with others who had died on the way. Many, many years later we put a memorial plaque on our family grave in the German Cemetery in Moscow.

The family was forced to go on. They were dumped off in a tiny village in Northern Kazakhstan and put up to live in local people's homes. Soon first all men and then all able women and young girls were taken away to forced labour. It was called, in true Orwellian spirit, called "Labour Army". 

 

Maria was the only one left of the family, but there were some other old Germans with her. Some of those were artisans and made it somehow. Maria was sixty, but healthy and strong. She went to the boss of the collective farm and asked for work. Her first job was to pile dried cow dung. They heated houses with cow dung because there was no wood in the steppe. In that way she made some wages and got a little flour. The boss liked Maria and invited her to work in a nursery school. It was good, the kids liked her, the mothers liked her because she never stole bread from the kids and shared equally between them all. Most nurses stole food from the kids since the nursery was relatively well-supplied.

Some years later Maria's youngest daughter, who had also been deported and survived the horrors of “Labour Army”, found her way to her mother. All in all, they stayed fifteen years in Kazakhstan. At the end of the war all Germans expected to be allowed to go home, as they had been promised. But there came an official to the village and read a paper for the Germans. It said that all persons of German nationality who had been deported in 1941 according to the special decree of the Supreme Soviet were to live at their places of deportation "for ever" - this was the first time they heard the words: "For ever". Every attempt at escape was to be punished by twenty five years of labour camp. This was also a new word. Anyone who helped Germans to escape was to be punished by five years of prison.

Then in 1953 Stalin died. Three years later all Germans were summoned to the police and received their ID-cards. Clean cards too, no stamps, no indication of deportation. The deported Germans had shown in practice that they were good Soviet citizens, was the verdict. And they had indeed. They worked as hard an anyone just to show that they were Soviet citizens. No matter good or bad, Soviet was it. There were even Germans who wanted to join the Communist party to show how they liked the authorities. The same authorities who had driven them away from their home and let them die in the steppe.

Anyway, the Germans were allowed to live where they wished, but not where they had lived before the deportation. In that way the authorities tried to avoid that the Germans would claim back their houses, schools and churches. They had no property rights. Still some of them moved back to Caucasus. They were not allowed to live where they had lived before, bit they still wanted to live near the places their forefathers had lived. They came one after another, bought houses in old German villages, got jobs. During the '60s, we would often go and visit granny's cousins in Pyatigorsk.

But the majority stayed in Kazakhstan. They had nowhere to go. Some moved to towns, others stayed in the country and went on as peasants. They were diligent and hard-working, they had saved money, built solid stone houses, worked their land, become well-off. They did not want to leave all that once again. Instead, they started schools, libraries, theatres and choirs. This is what our recent visitors fromKazakhstan referred to.

Since my Grossmama Maria was deported from Caucasus she was allowed to come and live with her daughter, my granny, in Moscow. I remember her well. In 1958 we celebrated her eightieth birthday with a huge family gathering. She spoke, read and sang to me in German. Sometimes I was horrendously nasty and rude to her, and I am still ashamed to think about it. She was the nicest, kindest person in the world.

She was the last of her generation, and everybody came to us, to her, on the forbidden Christmas Eve, but I have already told this story.

She died on May 11, 1962, when I was ten and didn't understand death. Perhaps because of that I cannot say that I miss her, in the same way I miss my granny. But I have warm memories of her. 

 

Interesting facts from individual Russian history, part 2

Here continues the story of my Grossmama Maria. 

Jonathan and Maria were rich and happy and generous. Jonathan gave money to schools, libraries, hospitals and a prison. He was just about to buy a whole street in Moscow and turn it into an artists' colony.

Then came the Great War, and it wasn't popular to be a German in Russia during the war. He was treated with suspicion. But they didn't take away his property. That came later. According to the family chronicle, when they confiscated all his millions, he said: "What a relief, they were such a nuisance!" For obvious reasons he had not read the Moomin stories, but this was a very Moominish comment.

The one who wasn't happy was Elly who had dreamed of going to Paris to study music at the Conservatory. But there was nothing she could do about it. So when she was old enough she went to Moscow, but that is another story.

Back to Jonathan and Maria. The post-war time in Northern Caucasus was long and confusing. The rulers changed all the time. One day the white army came and forced all high school boys and all other young boys to join them. Next day the red army came and hung and shot people without asking questions. Eventually the Soviet power was established, and Jonathan and his family were evicted from their house. (The house was later turned into an old people's home. When I visited it in 1991 it was being renovated).

The family left the town for a nearby village where they lived with a distant relative. First they lived by selling their belongings. Then Jonathan got some jobs. From time to time there came orders from the new government in Moscow to shoot the ten topmost citizens in the town. This was part of the Great Terror, and the purpose was to hold people in constant fear. There were orders that ten richest and most prominent citizens should get shot, and Jonathan had been one of the richest and most prominent. But someone would come late at night and say: "Uncle Jonathan, tonight we must come and arrest you and shoot you. If we don't do it, they'll shoot us. Get away and hide for a while". So he did. He became a school inspector, then he worked at a wool factory buying wool. Then someone squealed on him. Without any reason Jonathan was accused of being a "saboteur" and "an enemy of the Soviet state", they said that he had stolen state money. He was tried and sentenced to a year in prison, which was a very mild punishment at that time. So he went to the very same prison which he himself once had built.

When Jonathan was released he moved to a little village where he was offered a job as an organist in a little German church. He was the only educated person in the village, and he started a choir, an orchestra and an amateur theatre there. Then he became a school teacher. The children had already left their home and moved to Moscow to study. The first grandchild (that is, my father) was born in 1931. Maria and Jonathan loved their little grandson who would stay with them during summers. There was nothing like the wealth and luxury they one had, but they were happy, far away from the turbulent events in the big cities.

To be continued.

"Save the life of my child, cried the desperate mother"

All right, one thing at a time. Long, long time ago in another galaxy I was a young, silly single mother of a boy of four. It was summer, and I was imprisoned in the country because it was the duty of a good parent to give their children three months of summer holiday in the country. I let him play in the daytime while I tried to work (I was a free-lance translator at the time). I would take him for swims, but not let him make mud pies at the beach because he had a very bad eczema. I read bedtime stories for him. I cooked his meals over a little petrol stove, again very carefully because he was allergic to more or less everything. There was no grocery store in the village, and I had to take him on long walks to another village. There were no pushchairs so I had to be patient or carry him. I had enough to carry from the store. This is just to paint a pale background.

One Saturday morning he had fever, and half of his face was swollen. There were several options of getting to Moscow where the closest children's clinic was, but most were not operating on Saturdays. We had to walk for about forty minutes to the nearest bus stop, take an hour ride by bus, then another bus to the surgery. I didn't have enough money for a taxi. We had to wait for quite a long time, and when it was our turn, they said we were in the wrong place, we had to go to A&E. Another bus, another wait, and then they took him away, saying: “You are lucky you brought him now, two hours more, and it would have been too late... Good bye, we have phone inquiries on Thursdays between two and three, you can ask about his temperature”. “Wait!”, I cried, “He is just four years old, he has never been away from his family! He is allergic to everything! He has eczema and must have treatment every night!”

Well, Russia is a country where everything is prohibited and everything is possible. Within a couple of hours I found a friend of a friend of a friend who knew the nurse who knew the doctor, and at least I had first-hand information, although I still wasn't allowed to see my child, and the fruit I sent him, bought for my very last money, was most probably stolen by the nurses. Since he could not read it was pointless sending letters. Just as pointless sending toys. When I got him back after a week he wasn't much worse for it and told me with awe that the boys in the ward used bad words.

I couldn't help recalling this episode when my youngest son had to be operated for hernia at the age of two, in a Swedish hospital. I had to hold him while they fixed the tubes; I was allowed to follow in the ante-surgery room. They warned me that he would go to sleep much quicker than I expected, and I am glad they did, because he just went limp in my arms. Then they took him in and told me to go and get a cup of coffee. When they brought him out, still asleep, they said: “You must not leave him for a second, because when he wakes up, the first thing he sees must be your face”.

So many things...

I haven't blogged for a while, and I don't know where to start. I should blog about wonderful days with Norton Juster when I was a bit jealous because he and Staffan got up very early and talked and talked. I should blog about the death of Maurice Sendak, trying to say something that hasn't been said by everybody else. Just two days before, Norton was telling us about Sendak - they were so close friends. Before that, I was planning to blog about another, much less famous children's writer who had passed away, Leila Berg, whose book The Adventures of Chunky, I loved passionately when I was a child. I should also blog about the anxiety and despair of a young mother whose four-year-old child is taken away from her into a hospital, with the words: "It was good you came now, two hours from now would be too late... You can call the day after tomorrow".  The memory comes as we read reports about a grandchild in a hospital in Sweden, luckily surrounded by the loving family. I should blog about Julia's little cat who, sadly, is no more, which brings memories of just a couple of months ago. I should blog about yesterday being the Victory Day in Russia and what it once meant to me. In the first place, I should blog about the imminence of three-score.

Wings of history

Twenty year ago today I was in Moscow to attend the Congress of Compatriots. I still don't know who invited me and why; I was a Swedish citizen by then, but I guess the Soviet Embassy kept an eye on us expats. The Congress was one of many events that marked the new openness after Gorbachov's ascent to power; a huge gathering of diaspora from all over the world. I wasn't particularly keen to go because I was, as usual, suspicious of anything to do with the official side of my former Motherland, but Staffan was eager, and he wasn't invited. So we went by car, loaded with wheelchairs, Bibles and soft toys because I was at the time involved with charity work in Moscow.

We were placed in the monstrous hotel Russia overlooking the Kremlin, and in the morning, twenty years ago, we went down to breakfast, and then we were meeting one of my contacts who would collect the wheelchairs. We overslept after the long travel the day before and hadn't listened to the news. In the gigantic restaurant, two ladies were talking agitated at the table next to us. We addressed them politely saying that we couldn't help hearing their conversation, so could they please explain what was going on. After half a sentence, we left our breakfast unfunished and rushed to our room. The radio was playing classical music, the TV was showing an old movie, and we knew it was really bad. We were in the middle of a coup d'etat.

My wheelchair contact did turn up, only to say that as a medical doctor he had to be on the barricades in case of casualties. There were tanks in the city centre. We called our friends; they were packing emergency bags and expecting arrests (when it was all over, lists oif people to be arrested were indeed found, and all our friends were on those). We went to a newspaper office where all major dailies, already prohibited by the new authorities, were producing a joint flyer Everywhere we saw people bringing food to people oin barricades.The Congress of Compatriots continued as planned.

If you hear anyone say that they knew from start that it would all end well - that's not true! Everyone was in panic because everyone had their own or their family's memories of the Great Terror of the 1930s. The Swedish Embassy encouraged all Swedish visitors to go home. Many did. We were trying to figure out how many friends' children we would be able to save, and how. The radio was playing classical music, and TV was running old comedies. We listened to world news on our short-wave.

Don't believe foreign correspondents and casual eye-witnesses that claim they were not scared. We all were. But we, the visitors, at least knew that in real emergency we would find shelter in our embassies. Our Russian friends had no protection.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that classical music was interrupted by news from an independent station. The coup was suppressed, Gorbachov was back in Moscow after three days of house arrest. Statues of former KGB generals were pulled down. The Communist Party headquarters was sealed off. The hated regime was overthrown, although we didn't know it yet.

I was there.