WRONG COUNTRY

Chapter VIII

Reverting to the University

In August 1961, I returned to Leningrad. I was three months shy of 21. In my second attempt to enter University, I felt rather ‘sophisticated’ among all the agitated youngsters, having come to Leningrad from everywhere in the USSR for the competitive entrance exams. I even tutored a girl from the Ural. Rare case, she came with her mother. “Lady,” asked my last name. I answered:

-Asanova.

She became excited.

-Oh, is Nikolai Asanov your relative?

-My father.

-I love his novels!!! Are you from Ural?

-No, from Voronezh.

-But, where your father lives?

- In Moscow.

- Oh, what I thought, of course, in Moscow.

She read everything their native writer Nikolai Asanov published; especially, she gave me an unknown title of his novel. My father stopped sending me his new books because he understood that I was not interested in Socialist Realism literature. (Only now I understand how he was insulted by my contempt.) This Ural woman, definitely a wife of some high position’s communist bureaucrat, said that, for a while, she didn’t cook or clean because she couldn’t tear herself away from his political detective. “He is writing detective stories- what a pulp! I thought. Anyway, my father’s admirer and her daughter had to return to their Ural town since my two-week tutoring didn’t help her daughter get the highest mark on literature composition, the main obstacle. But I bought a beautiful gray, light wool dress from her. Her mother had her own dressmaker! Definitely, some district party bureaucracy.

My first year and a half of the second year were a waste of time because I credited all the exam results from my previous years and was free from exams. I wished to re-examine only one subject- folklore, because I got “satisfactory” from Professor Prop. So, I prepared for the exam seriously. On the day of the exam, I joined my group of students. My turn came to sit in front of the professor. Not looking at me, our ancient professor opened my record book and read my last name. “Asanova, A-sa -no-va,” he uttered slowly under his nose. “Where are you from?” I heard his question. “I am from Voronezh, but I was born in the Ural,” I answered, noticing that the professor was writing something in my record book. The exam was over before it began. The same thing happened the first time when I went for his exam two years ago—word for word. The Ural and my last name – this combination was malicious to my professor, as I understood this time. But I couldn’t guess– why, and I couldn’t ask the old professor.

In that year of 1962, we had the so-called period of the Thaw in literature, arts, and politics under Nikita Khrushchev. This term was taken from the title of Iliya Ehrenburg's novel Thaw. The first “swallow” was the publication of A. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the literary magazine New World. It evoked a revolution in our consciousness. Being so naïve, we knew nothing of the Gulag, and our parents were silent about it. Neither my mother nor father told me about his seven-year prison term for his first novel, Bread. When I learned of my parents' past, a suspicious thought came to me about the old Professor Prop: it might have been that some of his relatives suffered in Solikamsk’s gulag, where my father’s relatives in their turn could have served in the different oppressive positions. My aunt Liza gave me a photograph of my relatives when I visited her. Besides my young father, dressed casually, the other two men were in leather jackets, which had been the favorite apparel of the NKVD uniform. These abnormalities were possible in the USSR at every step of Soviet life, as you could find out from Sergei Dovlatov’s Zone, where one brother was a political prisoner while the other was guarding the same prison. Though I never learned why Professor Prop was so hostile to my last name. It’s only my speculation, for I read later that he was of German descent, and Volga’s Germans went through much persecution during WWII.

Chapter IX

New Friend and My Political Education

When I returned from my summer vacation to my second year of studies, I found out that I had to live in the dorm of the Law students, far away from our Faculty. Their building was the eighteenth-century former dormitory of the Institute for the Noble Maidens, with its enormous rooms for ten or fifteen students, which were uncomfortable and inconvenient. (The building was restructured during Soviet times.) I found myself among the ‘novices’; only one other girl and I from our second course were honored with this ‘Siberian exile.’ When I saw that girl, I understood it was a punishment. “But why me?” I wanted to know. By chance, I found out that a girl from the student council hated me so much that she sent me as far as possible. She used her right to allocate us to the dormitories. I never met this girl or learned her reason for hating me. But at her whim, I befitted myself to the “slavery’ of being friends with that another girl from the dorm to the end of her life.

It was hard to live in a crowd of twelve girls in one room. One of these girls, Galia, came from the Siberian Krasnoyarsk. Beautiful young girl, a fresh face, blond curls, as Dostoevsky noticed about Siberian girls (he spent eight years there, primarily, in a hard-labor camp): young ladies bloom as roses, and they are moral to the extreme. This rose in bloom had one arm. First, you couldn’t notice it. She always wore blouses or dresses with long sleeves and held her artificial arm in the pocket of her skirt. I could only imagine what torture it was for her to change her clothes, go to bed, or get up in the morning and run to the washing room. We became friends, and she told me her sad story. She lost her arm because a drunk driver overturned a bus with children during their school trip. Now, fresh from High school and intellectually somewhat untrained for Leningrad University, she had many troubles; I became an older sister to her as our relationship grew.

The other girl, also from our second course in that dorm, came with her own history. I heard her story, having lived in the same dorm with her three years ago. She was a thief, stealing from her roommates, and had to go to the Student Council meeting for a “trial.” Before the meeting, she threw herself off the third floor of a new dorm construction next to ours. She was taken to a hospital and spent some time there for her elbow injuries. Nobody believed in the sincerity of such a lucky fall; she was cynical enough to calculate a minimum of her physical damage. But it didn’t help her dodge her expulsion from the university.

We both lost two years of university study. Now, we had many chance meetings at the lectures, such as Folklore, History of Ancient or Classical Literature. She tried to befriend me. Knowing her past, I wanted nothing to do with her. But unfortunately, I couldn’t escape Galina, or Alia, as she called herself. One day, she approached me at a bus stop and offered to move to her room, which had only three beds. She explained that a girl from her room was expelled from university as a lesbian. First time I heard the word “lesbian” in our soviet life. Before, it was applied only to the Greek poetess Sappho, and here we are, some girl - a lesbian in 1962 in Soviet Russia. I didn’t even know that homosexuality existed in the USSR. It is considered a perversion and persecuted with imprisonment, the erudite Alia elucidated to me.

I recall later seeing the last performance of our famous Leningrad dancer Nureyev, after which the Mariinsky Theater left Leningrad on tour abroad. Suddenly, we heard that Nureyev asked for political asylum in Paris. It was the first open and grand scandal in the USSR. Traitor! He betrayed his Motherland! screamed the media. Who knew the great dancer was afraid to be sent to prison for homosexuality?

Despite all my hostility toward her past, I agreed to move to Alia’s small room. Alia had won in the equation of twelve roommates and one former thief. Some time later, she told me that she gave herself the word to win my friendship. She tried for a year and a half and got her way; I moved in. She was slowly growing on me. In the end, we became friends (to the end of her life) with her leadership in my political education and student life. Soon, the other girl moved out; she was Chinese, and when the Soviet–Chinese relations deteriorated, every Chinese student had to leave Russia. My Siberian Galia (common Russian name, full name is Galina) from the big room moved in with us. Three of us, two of Galina’s, and I created a small warm company. I forgot Alia's depraved past, and our life became exciting because of Alia's adventurous nature.

First, she introduced us to politics: on her short-wave radio, we began listening to Voice of America, which was banned as the voice of our enemy. Remarkably, we learned many facts about our country. For a while, we were lucky; nobody informed us. It was easy because our small room didn’t have a door; it opened into a big room with 10 beds. But we had plenty of snitches, and one day somebody had ratted on us. We were picked to pieces by our politically correct Student Soviet: One more ‘Voice,’ and you would be out of the University for good. Too late. However, we stopped for a while. Then Alia continued her listening under a blanket at night. On our way to the University in the morning, she shared all the news about our dissidents and the country. We refused to read our lying newspapers, using them in the toilets because of the absence of toilet paper in our proudly progressive Socialism.

Alia continued our political education with provocative questions, information, and even political anecdotes. Once she surprised us with the ‘real’ cause of Lenin's death: he had three strokes, officially, but his brain was destroyed by venereal disease. Alia opened our eyes. She told us a few anecdotes about Lenin and his henchmen, like they decided to go to some brothel, and Lenin ordered them to collect money, but only one ruble from each, because the country was in ruin. Or they go to a brothel, and Lenin asks his friends not to tell his wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna, for she has a perfect soul. Or Alia heard somewhere that Stalin called N. K. no less than a syphilitic whore. Thus, it was the end of the legend of our political leaders, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, the organizers of the Revolution, Socialism, and Gulag.

Then we began reading so-called forbidden literature if we could get it from different sources: samizdat, or even public or university libraries, but with special permission, as we read the famous modern Russian philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Vasily Rozanov. Lenin hated them both. For my part, I disliked Rozanov for his sense of vulgarity. Lenin included them in the list of dangerous intellectuals; next to Berdyaev's name, he wrote: EXILE. Rozanov was not prosecuted only because of his early death from hunger in 1919. I did not know at the time that Dostoevsky was Rozanov’s favorite writer- he loved him so passionately that he married his former lover Appolinaria Suslova, who was older than Rozanov by 20 years. Poor Rozanov suffered from her cruel character for 20 years.

After Stalin died in 1953, the sly and down-to-earth new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denouncing Stalin's “excesses” (he was the principal participant himself in those excesses), began the ‘liberalization’ of Soviet political and cultural life. But uneducated Nikita hated intellectuals and attacked them constantly in his abusive, rude language. Thus, the period of Thaw was short-lived. In 1963, Nikita came down with his vulgar language on the exhibition of Moscow artists and sculptors; he was especially cruel to sculptor Neizvestnyi, who stayed without any state orders for sculptures (the others didn’t exist), but, what an irony, when Khrushchev died, his relatives asked Neizvestnyi to make a sculpture for former lieder’s grave. (My father told me a story about Neizvestnyi.)

In 1964, in Leningrad, the Khruschev repressive apparatus began a trial against 23-year–old poet Josef Brodsky.

Alia learned about it from our student poet, Victor Krivulin, who knew Brodsky. We discovered that we are all the same age, but Brodsky left high school at 14 or 15 and began working in different physical jobs, but temporarily. Then he started writing poetry seriously, but the Soviet literary magazines did not publish non-Socialist Realism poets. So instead, he was charged with “malicious parasitism” because being out of a job violates Soviet Law.

We followed the news of the trial in Leningrad Pravda, a newspaper. But what to expect from the Communist organ of Propaganda: only accusations of parasitism from the workers of different ages and trades, all of them screaming, “Put him in prison! Parasite!” Luckily, Krivulin gave Alia a copy of the exchange between Judge and Brodsky, secretly written down by a certain brave woman journalist, present there. The Judge’s questions were so absurd that it was impossible to answer them. Bewildered, Joseph Brodsky had to respond. If I remember correctly, it followed like that:

Judge: Who calls you a poet?

Brodsky: No one.

Judge: Where did you study to be a poet?

Brodsky: Nowhere. It does not come from education.

Judge: Then, where from?

Brodsky: It is from God…

A judge sent the poet to a psychiatric hospital, where the authorities usually put the dissidents, and no one left that place. Brodsky had been lucky- he was found sane. Nevertheless, he returned to the same judge, who sent him to the North for five years of manual labor.

How those political idiots could not understand that in front of them was a real poet? We asked ourselves, having already read Brodsky in Samizdat, given by Krivulin. We were still so naive! After one year, thanks to the big noise of European intellectuals (Sartre wrote a letter to the government), Brodsky was released from exile but thrown out of his beloved Petersburg and Russia. We lost a great poet, the USA became his country, and we all know that in 1987, Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Soon, we learned that you could be sent to prison for reading the banned literature, according to Article 58-10 of Soviet legislation. But we were careless. One guy, whom I saw only two times, offered me to read a photocopied version of Solzhenitsyn's “First Circle” in his house. I agreed. His wife and child spent a summer at the dacha (summer house), and I spent a whole week at his house to read Solzhenitsyn alone. One day, he stayed home and offered a love affair to me, but he was so funny that it was easy to take it as a pleasant joke. (I saw the guy and his family in Rome twenty years later, among the Jewish émigrés waiting for the flight to Canada, while our wait was for the USA.)

Another time, our anti-political education turned out to be idiosyncratic to the time mode. Despising all the Soviet leaders quite openly, at the same time, we rushed out to the Neva embankment to see the tall, charismatic figure of Fidel Castro, the new leader of the new socialist Cuba. In 1963 or 1964, he visited the USSR, and the country accepted him as a Hero and glorified him for the Cuban Revolution. Soviet people still believed in the Revolution, even with the recent history of the Gulag. Several months later, two Cuban students, the revolutionaries in their recent past, somehow climbed out from the window on the portal of their dormitory on Tuchkov’s embankment, close to the Peter and Paul’s Fortress, and cut out the eyes of our president Brezhnev on his huge portrait. The next day, two brave, crazy girls were thrown out of our country. I am afraid they had joined all the brave Cuban anti-revolutionaries in the infamous Havana stadium, who perished without trial. Precisely as the Russians during Lenin-Stalin's tragic ‘cleansing.’