bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1996) — Fall 1996 // Automne 1996, pp. 43–44
A MOSCOW LITERARY MEMOIR: AMONG
THE GREAT ARTISTS OF RUSSIA FROM
1946 TO 1980 by Robert A.D. Ford (1995).
Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 307 p.
$00.00.
Robert Ford is a distinguished poet and a Russian scholar. He is also a legend in the foreign service, in part because he spent so many years in the Soviet Union, the last sixteen of them as Ambassador. When my husband, Geoffrey, was named to succeed him in 1980 and we set off to Moscow to replace the long-established Fords we anticipated a difficult personal transition. When we arrived there, however, we discovered an elegant residence in perfect condition, a well-trained but extremely nervous young Russian butler and, socially, a solid reputation for Canada among Russian writers and artists.
In A Moscow Literary Memoir Robert Ford documents how this reputation came about. Using diaries that he kept at the time, he reconstructs the encounters that he and his wife, Thereza, enjoyed with some of the most creative Russians of the Cold War period. And into their stories he weaves a fascinating personal account of the cultural climate of those difficult years. Always a careful observer he would return from a long liquid lunch with Andrei Voznesensky and friends at the poet’s dacha in Peredelkino or from a lively evening with Bella Akhmadulina or Evgeny Yevtushenko at the Moscow home of Ed and Nina Stevens and record what he had heard and seen. The use of these notes lends immediacy to his writing. We can almost hear Thereza’s witty, acerbic voice. His own voice, while occasionally cutting, is more muted.
The Fords’ encounters with the Russian cultural élite took place over a very long time and the author has organized his book more or less chronologically to cover the variety of the historical interactions that he witnessed between Soviet politics and Russian art. The book begins with Ford’s arrival in Leningrad, in 1946, with Thereza, his Brazilian bride of three months, en route to take up the post of first secretary at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. It ends in 1980 with the Fords sailing away from Leningrad to Helsinki, and Robert summing up his experience with a quote from the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin:
Much in silence I have thought Many songs myself bequeathed And in this grim world I’m glad That I have lived and breathed…
The Fords did not spend all these years in the Soviet Union; they left occasionally for other postings. But they always came back and together were observers of virtually the whole of the Cold War era, from the last years of Stalin through Khrushchev’s thaw to renewed repression and eventually the suffocation of the stagnation period under the ailing Brezhnev. Brezhnev was still alive when we arrived and we too experienced the strange cultural conditions the author evokes. It was only under Gorbachev that the situation changed and by that time we had also left Moscow. Because I tasted some of what the Fords had known and because I have a long-standing and deep interest in Russian life and culture I found much resonance in this book.
The Cold War era is an extraordinary period in the history of Russian literature. Every name that Robert Ford cites evokes a response. He writes about the many poets and novelists, musicians, dancers, actors and directors, painters and sculptors he knew or knew of and through the stories he tells about them (stories that are often intertwined) we learn about the unusual conditions of the arts under the Soviet regime. Each chapter is separated from the next by a poem; either by one of the poets who is featured (in a translation by Ford) or by one of his own poems about Russia. These remarkable poems are one of the gifts of this book, although I would have appreciated a little more context for them or, at the very least, the date of the original poem as well as the date of the translation.
Not surprisingly for a poet, the chapters on writers and on literature in general are among the strongest in the book. With respect to the other arts, especially the visual arts, I found him less sure. Fortunately, for the story of the visual arts in Soviet times we have a fine book by another former ambassador to the USSR, Peter Roberts. George Costakis: A Life in Art uses the story of that eccentric and discerning art collector who worked at the Canadian Embassy for years (and to whom, as Roberts has pointed out in a recently published letter, Ford is less than fair in this book) to discuss the wider issues of painters and sculptors in Soviet times. I agree, however, with Ford’s general comment that of all the arts, painting and sculpture were the ones most starved by Soviet cultural policy. After all, music can pass through the air and literature can cross borders in pages that can be copied. But to fully experience the genius of a painting or a sculpture one has to be in its physical presence. And this was forbidden.
I enjoyed reading this book. I had come to know the people Ford writes about through reading their texts and through critical and historical studies. And I had the opportunity to meet a number of them at various embassies, especially at Spaso House, the residence of the American Ambassador, Arthur Hartman and his wife, Donna, to which, after the Fords left, the Russian cultural élite flocked. So I was much interested by the Fords’ personal experiences. But, for me, the greatest value of the book lies in the degree to which Ford has captured the curious hot-house climate in which the Moscow-based Russian intelligentsia survived during the Cold War. The system repressed, censored and constrained; many individuals suffered a great deal. Yet at the same time the system protected the people Ford writes about from the cold winds of the free market and somehow created conditions that enabled them to have their own warmth reflected back to them from abroad. This symbiotic interaction between creative Russians and the West, including the representatives of western countries in Moscow, was an unusual and intriguing phenomenon and I hope that one day it will be analysed in depth. I recognize that a memoir is not designed for such a task.
In the brief epilogue to his book, Ford tells us what he knows about the current circumstances of some of his old friends and makes some hopeful comments about the survival of Russian culture. In today’s Russia, however, it is difficult to know what role, if any, the cultural élite can or indeed would want to play. According to a recent British report the young Russian writers are “shaking off the unbearable” and the ironic and subtle language of Ford’s friends and acquaintances has given way to prose that is tough, cruel and coarse. My own Russian friends continue to admire the great poets and writers who meant so much to them in difficult times; Tsvetayeva and Akhmatova, Pasternak and Bulganin and others that feature in Ford’s book. As a consequence they express discomfort and dismay at what the new writers are producing. Yet the talent is there and I am sure that writers and artists will eventually respond to the new conditions of Russian life in ways that are as universally accessible as in the past. It is unlikely, however, that there will ever be another Canadian poet as talented as Robert Ford living in our Moscow Embassy observing them.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1996) — Fall 1996 // Automne 1996, pp. 43–44. Read the rest of this issue →
