Explaining Tolstaya (in 1500 words or less)

After all the fuss I made over the PEN World Voices Festival, I only managed to make it to one event, Tatyana Tolstaya in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick. While I wish I'd had the time to attend more events, I was happy to make it to this one. I admire both Remnick and Tolstaya, and knew that the two of them would carry on an engaging conversation. Tolstaya was armed with many a metaphor, and answered every question with a wit and poetry I could only dream of having in my second language. And I can only dream of reproducing them properly here. But I'll try.

She spoke of her grandfather, Alexei Tolstoy, and his relationship with the Soviet elite as one of the birds that feed from the mouth of crocodiles, providing necessary cleaning for the crocodile, and obtaining food for themselves. The mouth of the crocodile will shut eventually, it's only a matter of when.

Remnick asked her to explain ("in 1500 words or less") the importance of Pushkin to Russians, and she said "This is a mystery. There were sounds floating out there and he came and put them on the table. There was archetype, sound, and literary language; he put them in order." She said that explaining Pushkin is like explaining the creation of life on earth - it's not logical that life should come from non-living matter, but it happened. This is Pushkin.

Putin, too, had his metaphor. To young Russian writers, he's the goldfish in fairy tales, the one that gives you three wishes when you catch it. She told an anecdote of a group of young writers who met with Putin, and how afterwards they expected some sort of privilege to come from it. One of them asked Putin what kind of books he liked to read, and he answered: "If I tell you what types of books I like to read, you will all start writing them."

The two of them spoke much of politics, and the relationship of literature to politics. Of how in the new Russia, literature is not as attached to politics; the politicians find it more lucrative to go after journalists, because power is money in the new Russia, and the only writers who have any influence on money are the journalists. No one is affected any longer by literature in Russia. Not in the way they once were.

She spoke of the way things once were, what it was like to be a writer in the Soviet Union in the 1970s (when the anti-liquor Soviet censors could edit your stories for mentioning a glass - "A glass of milk is okay, but just a glass, this could be bad.") and then again in the late eighties, during glasnost, when you were more likely to be published for being anti-everything ("They would say to you: not enough rape!"*).

The questions came, and as usual, the second I decided to ask one, my pulse raced and I felt a sweat breaking out. I think this might stem from the time when I accidentally insulted both Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer with the same question. It is far too easy to embarrass yourself at these things. (And unfortunately, several question askers did elicit eye rolls from the rest of the audience.) My question was about homeland, about whether the fantastical world she created in The Slynx, like the twisted nightmarish worlds of Pelevin and Sorokin, was created as an attempt to reinvent the concept of homeland after years of having it invented for them. Maybe the audience would have rolled its eyes at this as well. But I was never called on. (Though, apparently, if I had been able to attend the event on Friday afternoon called "Imaginary Geographies," in which Tolstaya took part, I might have received my answer.)

It was Salman Rushdie, whose presence created a commotion of shifting bodies in seats, who asked the final and most interesting question. He said that he met Tolstaya at a 1988 conference in Portugal, at which there was great tension between the Soviet writers and the Central European authors. He wanted to know what the relationship was now between Russian authors and authors from the former Soviet Union. Interesting, considering the recent tensions between Estonia and Russia that this should come up. Tolstaya was blunt: "No one cares about them. Freedom means no one cares about you."

Unfortunately, she's right. As soon as the strings were cut, names like Janis Rainis, Nora Ikstena, Jaan Kross, Marius Ivaskevicius, and Mati Unt no longer meant anything to their lumbering Eastern neighbor. Except to certain Guardian journalists and Baltophiles.

Is this a challenge, Ms. Tolstaya? Should we try to make them care? Certainly the Russians living in these countries have something to care about. (Cue weeks of furious work on polishing Latvian translations…)

On that note, in my search for some of the names above, I was reminded of the wonderful multi-lingual online magazine Eurozine. Go read Pauls Bankovskis' article "The Joy of Small Places." Now.

While you're reading things, be sure to spend some time with Tolstaya's short story "See The Other Side" , in which she fittingly writes "what was once important, is now unimportant."

*I should exhibit more caution in using quotation marks, as I'm really paraphrasing. The pressure of transcribing the words of someone who herself lives through words is almost too much to bear.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.