To travel with a celebrated poet is to constantly be on the hunt for coffee and cigarettes. In fall 2005, near the beginning of our coast-to-coast reading tour, we stopped at a packed Starbucks in Manhattan on our way to an interview on a Russian television show. Sergey Gandlevsky, a poet known equally for his alcohol-fueled benders and his rigorously classical and ribald verse, was itching for caffeine. He’d just been named Russia’s most important living poet, but accolades don’t solve headaches. He blew past the sleep-weary queue of customers and parked himself in front of the cash register. I tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“Sergey, the line is over there,” I whispered.
“This American line is so stretched out,” he said. He hadn’t noticed the line at all. “So full of holes. In Russia, if you’re in line, you are so close that you can get pregnant.”
The first time standing in line with Svetlana in an anarchic bread store on Tverskaya, back in 1992, I recalled how just a week before I’d been sitting in the local library reading about the dance of the queues in Hedrick Smith’s The Russians: “Soviet queues have a dimension all their own, like the Egyptian pyramids,” and that, ominously, “the accepted norm is that the Soviet woman daily spends two hours in line a day, seven days a week.” The real magic was that there was not one line, but three: one line for seeing what was available behind the counter (since everything was, in fact, behind a counter and untouchable to the grabbing masses—quite literally everything of value); one line for the cash register, where you can pay for what you wanted; and one line to receive what you’d spied and then paid for. And, that you could ask someone to hold your spot in the second line while spying what was available in the first line, so that the line itself — however long — could actually be twice or three times that length, depending on how many invisible customers were having their places held. The Soviet Union was dead, its head cut off, but everyone kept running around in these lines. The people had to eat.
“I just read about this,” I exclaimed to Svetlana, in wonder.
“It’s better that you’ve only read about it,” she responded, lifting her eyebrows, then shifted her body forward, as if tethered by some invisible inch-long chain to the woman waiting in front of her.
I told Gandlevsky about the incident on Tverskaya.
“Now, on Tverskaya,” he said, “all you can buy are diamonds. Not a bread store anywhere near the place.”
In my time there, Tverskaya became the barometer of Russia’s prosperity — the artery that ended right at the Kremlin wall.
“So where do people get food?” I said.
“Not on Tverskaya,” he said. “You can’t eat diamonds.”
I couldn’t imagine it, that avenue where I searched vainly for a simple café.
“The first time I came back from America,” Gandlevsky admitted, “I was surprised how it felt to be back in a Russian line. It’s all boorishness, but it’s good boorishness.”
Boorishness — khamstvo — was a word I kept hearing in Russia back then, and felt it even before I’d learned what it meant. Once, as I walked along an empty metro platform, a babushka-sized Matryoshka waddled toward me going the opposite direction, hauling two bags so full of groceries and other supplies it was clear she intended to survive the next starvation. I was at least five feet from her, with space to pass, but for reasons I can’t entirely explain, she kept vectoring toward me—the way, when you’re driving and looking at the dividing line, you unconsciously drive toward it—and whaled me with her survival supplies. Shit! I muttered, my hip smarting from the blow. She didn’t even turn back. She may not have even felt or heard me. It was as if she measured her comfortable passage by human proximity rather than by distance.
At the table of Dima and Natasha, two Russian translators, I recounted my adventure with the burly grandmother.
Dima, who would soon become my mentor, said, “but this is just the way we walk. We want to be close to each other! It’s pleasing to be surrounded by crowd of people. You are anonymous and completely one with everyone else.”
Natasha just shook her dark head, sighing aloud, pouring everyone a bit more tea and offering some apple pie. In her delicate English accent, cultivated from years of learning and adoring English entirely in Moscow classrooms, I know what she was thinking: boorishness. They’re probably both right.
This scene — the scene of my being shoved and struck by some grandma’s baggage —occurred so many times, that by the time my family arrived on New Year’s, I told them to expect being struck. If you get angry with them, I’d said, they will produce a state identity card explaining that they’re an invalid. Perhaps they too had been struck so many times by other bags that they earned this special badge. One day, perhaps, I too could earn such a badge.
What’s strange to me is that the situation of lines is almost completely reversed in poetry. In Russian poetry, the rule is that each line unscrolls and opens fully by its end, nearly always with a rhyme, before it heads down to the next line. Even if the line ends with a comma, there’s the sense that one can rest a second before heading into what’s next. In American poetry, particularly in the past one hundred years, lines careen into each other, employing enjambment with reckless abandon. Enjambment, from the French word meaning “to straddle,” creates a surging double-sided energy. Is it possible that Russian life already surged too much to require enjambment, and that what really was needed was the steadiness of a completed thought? When Gandlevsky began to employ some enjambments here and there in his poems, even cutting off words in the middle, he still was governed by rhyme. I’m probably reading too much into the business of lines, except to say that Russian poetry, at least in my understanding of it, always seemed like a place to escape from the madness of its civilization, a place where a musical order could reign, and beauty and some secret illogical reason would win in the end.
Months later, tired of lines and Russian life in general, I’d laugh to see how the summer cottages on the wild, unpopulated shores of Lake Baikal were bunched so close together they looked like they were one connected building — as if any distance between them would mean bitter loneliness or death. In America, with our settler mentality and bourgeois privacy, we can’t wait to separate ourselves into grass-surrounded islands, little bubbles of self-created reality.
Back in the Manhattan Starbucks, Gandlevsky and I retreated to the end of the only line and, with an American distance between ourselves and the last person, waited meekly for the coffee. One of the aproned workers was sweeping the remains of a scone into the trash.
* * *
At the New York studio, the well-coiffed white-haired Russian television host leaned in meaningfully and said to Gandlevsky: “you’re a genius. Well?”
Gandlevsky stared at him as if he had two well-coiffed heads, and then began a series of deflections. His interviewer-interrogator kept fishing for sound bites, but Gandlevsky wouldn’t take the bait, refusing to be reeled in and chopped into bits.
I’d been contacted by the producer and thought it was an opportunity that he shouldn’t turn down. But sitting in the control room lined with monitors, looking at multiple Gandlevskys being interviewed by multiple hosts, I knew I’d made a mistake. Like Warhol’s pseudo-iconostasis of nearly-identical Marilyns, I could see Gandlevsky from every angle but the one that could peer inside his skull.
The first time I met Gandlevsky, at the top of the steps outside Polyanka metro station, I knew it was him from the photographs, though he was even more imposing, his posture suggesting insouciant self-confidence. He stuck the cigarette pinched in his hand between his teeth while he shook my hand. With his other hand, the leash lashed around his fist, he held back his gigantic white Boxer “Charlie,” roughly the size of Cerberus. I was surprised by how tall Gandlevsky he was. Most Russian men were diminutive, a head shorter than I, a chow-fed vitamin-addled American. I craned my head up to face him. The truth is, even if I were taller, I’d have felt as if I were looking up at him anyway. Such is the gaze of idealization.
He’d agreed to an interview on the phone, and suggested that we talk at his place. On the way back to his apartment, we stopped in a park to let Charlie/Cerberus bark at smaller dogs, and then passed an old monastery. Here, Gandlevsky stopped short, pointed up to the crumbling roof, and recalled spending an evening there, splitting a bottle of vodka with a drinking buddy. I thought of his poem of relentless travel, “Twilight came late”:
On the pier, an old crone waits,
Breathing raw vodka, iron-toothed
And helpful in searches for roofs.
Thus will be my angel of death.
I thought of the cover of the Replacements’ Let It Be — how the band perches out on a roof, which made me want more than anything to spend more time on roofs. Years later, driving with Gandlevsky in Bloomington, Indiana, we passed a one-story house where about fifty students, with cups of beer in hand, roosting and rousting about on the roof, covered the rust-colored shingles like wild hair.
That’s the image of poets we tend to have — that they are wild, half-mad, uncivilized creatures, like Bakhyt Kenjeev and his hair. Once, when the Russian scholar Nyusya Milman was hosting the illustrious poet Kenjeev, she asked him in the hallway right before his reading whether he’d like a comb for his hair. It was, as it happened, sticking out wildly, more mane than hair. Bakhyt looked at her for a moment, without a word, as if she were absolutely crazy, then proceeded into the auditorium. Perhaps Robert Herrick was right about the poetic stylishness of a “studied unconcern.”
By contrast, Gandlevsky seemed orderly, his beard trimmed and his hair buzzed short, and he was freshly washed and rested. Inside Gandlevsky’s cozy apartment, his wife Lena’s earth-toned pottery and sculpture filled the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I conducted my interview, nodding nervously at every word I understood, as Gandlevsky gamely gesticulated, as if to clear the haze of language thickening between us.
He was surprised I’d known that he was the grandson of an Orthodox priest, as if I’d known a bit too much about him. He joked that though the Soviet Union is long dead, but the union of Soviets is what made him. His grandmother on his father’s side was a Jew from the Ukraine. The family spoke Yiddish and home, learning Russian only at age sixteen. They lived in dirt, in unhappiness, and she lost siblings during the pogroms.
“I’m anti-Soviet,” he explained, “but the paradox is that my family would never have happened except during the Soviet period — that the daughter of a priest would marry a poor Jew from the Ukraine.” This sort of mixed parentage wasn’t just an idyll of the U.S.S.R. “I have the ironic position,” he said, “of being considered a Jew by the Soviet Union and a goy by Israel.”
He was like me, I thought, a hybrid, not quite at home anywhere — neither in America nor in Russia nor in any other country in the world.
The name Gandlevsky, it happens, comes from the Ukrainian word meaning revenue or earnings. They must have been peddlers of some sort.
“Do you know what this means?” he explained. “I was born to be a charlatan!”
He was urbane, self-mocking, and larger than life. I told him that I thought his poems had captured the spirit of his age, but also felt something deeper in the poems, something universal, and asked him what he thought.
He paused. “I love Russian poetry very much, and I like what it’s done. Not because I am somehow attached to Russian or believe in the ‘Russian idea.’ I am attached to Russian poetry, like Korolenko, when he said: ‘My homeland is Russian literature.’”
I was smitten. It was exactly how I’d felt — at home nowhere in the world but inside the minds of books. My whole life, I’d been living inside books. To enter into a good book is to be in another world, an alternate universe, but one that unfolds slowly, at the speed of sight scanning across a page, rather than one that constantly threatens to undo you. It had been a morning ritual that I’d bury myself in a book or the newspaper and my father would castigate me for reading at the table. Looking back now, it seems as if reading were a strategy of independence. Living with doting parents who spent their working lives scanning the unconscious of their patients (and, invariably, their children), withdrawing into books gave me a space to be unseen, to be myself. To be free. In some parallel way, Gandlevsky and I both found in books a shield from our respective Panopticons.
“Do I think that I reflect the Russian idea or the world universally? You know, it seems to me that even puddles in a field path and a city park pond, and the sea — all, to a certain degree, reflect the sky and in that sense are universal. On the other hand, they are different reservoirs. If it is pure (by “pure” I imply not ethical purity, though desirable, but aesthetic purity) and talented, then in the end, it’s not important if others decide it’s more interesting to you that I reflect something especially Russian or have a relationship to world experience. Russians, Japanese … we’re all people.”
His way of thinking was utterly free of the hard bludgeon of Russian nationalism that kept cracking me over the head, wielded by disgruntled poets and cashiers and bystanders alike. Once, at an Orthodox mass in Pskov, amid the heavenly and endlessly-eternal choral singing, one of the scrum of old women at the back of a church turned to me.
“Are you a believer?” she asked.
“I’m Catholic,” I replied.
“That’s not a real religion,” she asserted, and turned back to her one truth faith.
Russians couldn’t resist making me feel like an outsider, someone who came from a materially richer but spiritually poorer country. But Gandlevsky was sanguine about the anarchic changes happening in Russia, relieved to be out from under the suffocating weight of Soviet power. In the immortal battle between Slavophiles and Westernizers, he tilted West.
He didn’t even mind that the poet seemed to have fallen off his societal pedestal. It was abnormally, inhumanly high, and in the end had drawn people for whom literature was a means, not an end.
“I have a secret conviction,” he said, “that to live a normal, boring, routine, human life, to go to church, to believe a little in God, to give flowers to women, to yield them your place, to have children in normal ways—perhaps this is unbearably boring, is a good way to live. What intellectuals in the West live, perhaps I’m mistaken, is that measured life. You can live that way. To live by the laws of hysterics is impossible. Then life turns into a hell. What began with the avant-gardists (Blok, Bely), hystericism lifted into a law, ends in a boredom more frightening than boredom in America. It ends with gulags, misery, and blood.”
Now, years later, I wonder if he longed for the kind of life that I would inherit, while I longed for the kind of life he’d had. He volubly longed for neat lawns, comfort, domestic and social order, and I secretly wanted to work as a night watchman and train guard in the provinces of Russia, to live and burn to the stub end of life. But he was prone to the drink and I was often scared that one drink would ride me off the rails entirely — knowing what happened to my grandmother and the 47 bottles of whiskey that my mother found in her bedroom, the night they came back from the emergency room.
Later, we relaxed over a dinner of beef cutlets and potatoes. After watching the evening news, a Russian-dubbed version of “The Blues Brothers” came on. In the typical Russian dub-job from the period, all the voices were read by the same actor in the same dull monotone, which had comic effects particularly in romantic scenes. Once, sleepless from jet lag in Moscow, I happened upon a midnight showing of “Playboy’s Girls of the Car Wash,” and the same dubber pronounced the canned dialogue of car-washing girls with all the elán of a cargo train dispatcher.
Watching “The Blues Brothers,” I began to translate the cultural significance of John Lee Hooker, and Gandlevsky nodded, as if he knew without knowing. He understood the blues intuitively. If there’s one thing that Russians do well, it’s the metaphysics of the blues. Hundreds of years of serfdom don’t rinse out in a few generations.
Still, one moment in particular stymied my translation. In the movie, James Brown plays the Reverend Cleophus James, and is singing his way through a church service replete with the faithful leaping and somersaulting in the air as if from a trampoline, when Jake and Elwood Blues, in funeral black, wander in. It is at this moment that Jake, played by John Belushi, finally sees the light. Bathed in a heaven-sent glow, Jake has the vision that will save the old orphanage where he and Elwood grew up: getting the band back together.
Reverend Cleophus James a.k.a. James Brown calls out, “Do you see the light?!”
(How to translate the funk of James Brown?)
“Do you see the light?” he said again.
“The band,” Jake murmurs, in the throes of a vision.
To which Elwood replies, “What light?”
* * *
In New York, Gandlevsky continued to see his own light, while the interviewer kept blundering in the dark. Poet, you are a tsar, not a pop star. Alexander Pushkin, the Shakespeare of Russian literature, once wrote (in Philip Nikolayev’s supple translation):
You’re a king: live alone. Follow freely the roads
Along which your free mind impels your seeking feet,
Perfect the precious fruits of your beloved thoughts,
Demanding no rewards for that most noble feat.
We need to be free to roam our own minds, to follow their own dark paths, not constantly to be under bright lights, interrogated by television personalities and their need for microwaved bon mots and commercial breaks.
“It was embarrassing,” Gandlevsky admitted after.
I suspect that Pushkin would have been proud of Gandlevsky and his evasions, but Pushkin died at 37 because his pride required him to duel someone who was flirting with his wife rather than endure the doubts that he was a cuckold. Damned Romantics. Now poet, you must wash your hands, wait for trains, smile for pictures, and try not to embarrass yourself when ordering food in a foreign language.
Walking around Princeton University, its buildings majestic imitations of Old Europe, we passed a diner called “Soup Man.”
Gandlevsky stopped and pointed to the sign. “Once, a friend of mine sat down in a restaurant and ordered what he thought was soup. The waiter asked him how much he wanted, and he said a big one. The waiter came back with a full bottle of shampoo.”
It’s such a helpless feeling for a poet, who lives on the insides of words, to confront the obdurate exteriors of a new language and culture.
“When Bella Akhmadulina came to America, she mistook dish soap for cooking oil.” Gandlevsky smiled, thinking of one of the grand dames of Russian poetry.
“She fried up some eggs in Palmolive.”
I laughed. Not because she was foolish, but because I knew exactly that level of disorientation — that your olive oil turns out to be soap, or that the word you think means onion actually means meadow, so you’re wondering if there’s a lot of “meadow” in the soup.
Gandlevsky and I both felt the trouble of our separate languages, trying to explain the inexplicable to each other — what his poems meant, what I was thinking or feeling. Since Gandlevsky didn’t even try in English, we found ourselves not in a meadow, but in some dark room. He’d try to narrow his vocabulary like a master to his pet, and I’d fumble for words like a dog trying to open a door. I’d paw and paw at the knob, hoping in vain for someone to come and let me out into the light.