Beatnik Trip to Hell Goes Russian

The gates of consciousness are swinging a little wider in Russia these days.Beside "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" on the shelf of accessible American classics is a new title: "Naked Lunch," William Burroughs' unflinching descent into the mind of a drug addict. The 1959 novel was composed, by the author's admission, during phases of withdrawal from addiction to morphine, opium, heroin, diosane, dicodid, demerol, palfium and eukolyn. When it appeared in print in the United States, "Naked Lunch" blew the minds and stoked the creative fires of countless beat-era artists. The book also sufficiently ruffled mainstream sensibilities to fuel Supreme Court obscenity trials in Massachusetts and California. Viktor Kogan and Alexander Shatalov are hoping to meet less resistance this time around. Painstakingly produced by a small Moscow press, and translated by a man who has virtually made it his life's work, "Goly Zavtrak" may be depraved, violent, disgusting and even obscene, but it is just as obviously a labor of love.The two of them believe, along with the high courts of Massachusetts and California, that there is redeeming social importance in bitnichestvo. Beatnikism was a West Coast movement whose artists shrugged off the conservative mores of the '50s and rebelled with their lifestyle and literary style.It was not a style that the Soviets translated, though. Experimental works such as "Naked Lunch" have expanded the possibilities for Western writers, and could do the same for Russians, said Shatalov, whose publishing house, Glagol, has also translated and printed works by James Baldwin, Eduard Limonov and E.M. Forster."These are the books we could never have," he said. "If I can, I want to compensate for that vacuum."Kogan, 45, credits "Naked Lunch" with helping him kick his own drug habit, and notes that one of the first Russian readers of the work not only stopped taking drugs but "became gay." Still, he does not consider "Naked Lunch" a social tool. "I look at the book just as it is, and no more," he said. "I don't think any book can change anything."Kogan made his first attempt at translating the novel 10 years ago, and has been wrestling with the 235-page hallucination ever since. During that period, he has translated the rest of William Burroughs, most of Jack Kerouac, some of Tom Wolfe and all of Frank Zappa. But he could not stay away from "Naked Lunch." The edition printed in Moscow by Glagol is Kogan's fifth draft, but the translator brushes it aside like another galley proof. "I am very satisfied to have it published, but as we say in Russia, it's the first pancake," Kogan said. A later draft -- the sixth or seventh, "I haven't counted," Kogan said -- is in the hands of the Northeast publishing house in St. Petersburg. And this, he says, is the end of the road for "Naked Lunch." "I am sick and tired of it. That's enough." Who can blame him? Burrough's narrative is a string of repulsive, violently sexual images from the mind of a recovering junky. Only his own drugs experience gave Kogan the capacity to translate the untranslatable, he said. "On the first try, I saw that he was right in every sense about drugs," Kogan said. "He knew not by hearing about it, but by doing it. Not even doctors know anything about drugs."Now Kogan is trying to disengage himself from the 1960s and work with more contemporary writers, maybe Thomas Pynchon. But he has had trouble finding modern artists with "the same energy." There's still time for the Age of Aquarius to hit here, he said. "Russia has always been 20 or 30 years late."