Russian Writer
Homing Instinct
Emigre writer Vassily Aksyonov retakes the Moscow literary scene by storm.
By Victor SonkinPublished: December 17, 2004
Strictly speaking, Vassily Aksyonov was not entirely shocked to receive this year's Open Russia Booker Prize, as his was the most famous name on the shortlist. But since the prolific emigre novelist had yet to win a single literary prize in Russia, let alone in his adopted United States, he wasn't going to jump to conclusions. Nothing was certain until the end of the ceremony on Dec. 2, when the jury's chairman, satirical novelist and longtime friend Vladimir Voinovich, named him the winner of Russia's most prestigious literary award.Given for best novel of the year, the Booker prize is sponsored by Open Russia, a humanitarian organization backed by jailed Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In his short acceptance speech at the Golden Ring Hotel ceremony, Aksyonov toasted "our prisoner" and closed by calling for Khodorkovsky's freedom.
"It's an absurd paradox," said the 72-year-old writer in an interview last week in his spacious Moscow apartment, "that people gather at a luxurious hotel in the center of Moscow to give a prestigious literary award, with television crews and journalists everywhere, while the man who made it possible is behind bars. We are getting mixed signals from the authorities all the time. It's bizarre and confusing."Though Aksyonov left the Soviet Union for the United States in 1980, he keeps a second apartment in a Stalinist skyscraper in central Moscow, and has been spending more time here in recent years. However, what with the constant invitations to judge local writing competitions, meetings with his readers and interviews with the press, the author prefers to go to his seaside house in France to write.Fame came to Aksyonov amid the cultural thaw of the early 1960s with his publication of two romantic novellas, "Oranges From Morocco" (Apelsiny iz Morokko) and "Surplussed Barrelware" (Zatovarennaya Bochkotara), in the liberal literary magazine Yunost. For a while, things were looking up for the young writer, who quickly became one of the cultural heroes of his generation.As the political pendulum swung backward in the late 1960s, though, the outspoken Aksyonov found himself on the wrong side of the Soviet regime. "Unlike in the United States, in Russia a writer doesn't count as an intellectual -- he is supposed to be a bohemian figure," he said. "That's exactly what I was: socializing with my friends, having heated discussions, meeting foreigners. Not everyone liked it." It wasn't long before the KGB got wind of his most anti-Soviet manuscript to date, "The Burn" (Ozhog), which Aksyonov had no intention of publishing. In 1977, he received a visit from two agents, who told him point-blank that if "The Burn" were ever printed, "we'd have to say our goodbyes to you." Aksyonov said that he had not been planning to publish it, and they appeared to be satisfied. In the wake of that conversation, however, the writer found himself barred from traveling abroad and his submissions relegated to magazines' slush piles. Unwilling to play by the authorities' rules, he told a Voice of America radio interviewer that he was being forced into exile and, meanwhile, contributed a piece to Metropol, the uncensored samizdat almanac that brought together the cream of his generation's literary elite. But the threats and surveillance only grew more intense, and when Aksyonov found the tires of his car slashed -- the broken knife defiantly left in the rubber -- he made up his mind to emigrate. "I met a high-positioned apparatchik and told him I was fed up and wanted to leave the country," the writer recalled. "He beamed and said, 'Well, that solves all our problems, doesn't it?'" Arriving in the United States in 1980, the prominent dissident was immediately shuttled into the university system, and taught Russian literature and writing in the Washington area before retiring earlier this year from George Mason University. "An American university is a miracle," he said last week. "[It] preserves the venerable tradition of shaping a harmonious personality. A biologist or a computer scientist needs credits in the humanities to complete his studies. It's wonderful."Having followed Russian politics from abroad for the past two decades, Aksyonov does not take current anti-American sentiment in Russia too seriously. "It's a fad," he said. "In the hungry years, around 1990, people went to the other extreme. Some wanted the Americans to occupy Russia and set things straight. It's clear to me that Russia is a part of Western civilization, and that what's happening now is that some people are unwilling to accept the obvious."Perhaps at no time since the 1960s has Aksyonov been such a presence on the Russian literary scene. Five of his books have been published or republished in Russia over the past few months. October brought the Booker nomination and the premiere of Dmitry Barshevsky's 22-part television series based on the writer's epic trilogy, "Moscow Saga" (Moskovskaya Saga), about a family's experiences under Josef Stalin. Aksyonov did not participate in preparing the television series, which received largely negative reviews in the Russian press. "I saw the 4 1/2 hour promo version and rather liked it," he said. "The actual episodes seemed less satisfactory." But the writer expressed his happiness at the interest that the series sparked in the original novels, even among his own family members. "When we came home after watching 'Moscow Saga,' my wife snatched the book from the shelf at once. She had read it before, of course. It just illustrates the power of filmmaking," he said.With his publications and popularity on the rise, Aksyonov is not that worried about his financial prospects. Still, being a writer in Russia is not a proper full-time job. Royalties and advances are substantially higher in the West, he said, and Western publishers spare no effort in promoting their product. "They send me on book tours, put me up in good hotels and organize press conferences and book signings."
Igor Tabakov / MT
Vassily Aksyonov keeps homes in Moscow and Washington, but prefers to do his writing in France.
Touring America over the years, Aksyonov has learned a thing or two about what makes foreign readers tick. "Once, I was signing 'Moscow Saga' in a huge American bookstore," he said. "A female customer stopped by, bags in hand, and asked what the book was about. I said it was about Russia, and she went on by. Well, I thought, that was not good salesmanship. I said to the next customer that it was a story of a doctor's family, and she bought it."The Booker-winning novel, "Voltairiens and Voltariennes" (Volteryantsy i Volteryanki), dreams up a clandestine meeting between the French philosopher Voltaire and Catherine the Great, who in fact corresponded for many years but never met. After buying a rare 1801 edition of their correspondence for $800 in a Moscow bookshop, Aksyonov set out to write the novel, which he calls "a true story that never happened." "To imitate 18th-century style, to find the right tone, was very difficult," he said. "At one point I was ready to drop the idea. But I continued reading, studying this fascinating epoch, and at some point the story just started writing itself."Twenty-four years abroad have given Aksyonov perspective on changes in his native country, and he has adjusted his writing along with the times. He recently completed a screenplay based on his 1983 novel "The Island of Crimea" (Ostrov Krym), a utopian vision of a free, Westernized Crimea hanging on at the edge of the Soviet Union. Now that the political landscape has altered, Aksyonov was forced to fudge political details to keep the story timeless."Things have changed since I wrote the novel, so in the script it is all metaphysical. It does not happen at any specific time," he said. "It is now about this curious nostalgia for the past that so many Russians feel."
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