The America Complex

Here's one thing that Moscow and New York have in common: If you want to get the lay of the land, the best person to ask is your proverbial taxi driver. Just this past October, for instance, I was riding home late one rainy night down a slick Leningradsky Prospekt when the conversation turned to the subject of daylight savings time, which was ending that weekend. I mentioned that the clock would be changing in the United States, as well.

"No," the driver said authoritatively. "They don't switch around the clock in America. Only Russians would think of something as crazy as that."

Was he criticizing his country, or congratulating it? In light of the similarly perverse pride expressed by many of the 26 contributors to "Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States," edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, I'd have to conclude that he meant it as a compliment. If there's one point on which nearly all of the essayists in this collection seem to agree, it's that while Russia may seem unstable -- even madly self-destructive -- when compared to the West, that "craziness" is just part and parcel of what makes it great, and its culture incomparable.

For decades prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States served as Russia's foil, the other heavyweight duking it out in the great balance-of-power arena, the opposite of everything that Russia stood for. From the official Soviet perspective, this translated into a very nasty portrait of that distant giant across the Atlantic: cutthroat capitalists, racist politics and cowboy presidents with one finger menacingly poised on the button. From the unofficial and hyper-intellectual perspective, the constituency that most of the writers in this collection represent, America during the Soviet period became a repository for individualism and free thought, an "anti-country, a state in reverse," as poet and novelist Sergei Gandlevsky writes in his delightfully irreverent account of his cynical, hard-drinking Soviet-era youth.

Of course, neither the ideological nor the intellectual myth of America was accurate. They were simply the preferred inversions of whatever one took to be Soviet reality, blissfully ignorant of America as it was. For many of these writers, disillusionment followed hard on the heels of the Soviet Union's collapse; the alluring America of jammed shortwave Radio Liberty broadcasts and Jim Morrison became "Amerika" -- crass, corporate and Kafkaesque. "After the fall of the 'Iron Curtain' the outside world lost all its charm for me and probably for a certain number of other Russian people," critic Igor Shevelev writes. "From now on there was nowhere to run, except inside oneself."

Indeed, it's hard to run away from America these days. As the contributors to this volume grimly acknowledge, America is everywhere -- in politics, on billboards, in music, on television. And most of them are convinced that they know all there is to know about it: Americans smile too much. They're diligent and efficient, but lack a sense of irony. They live in houses with glass-paneled front doors. Culture is recreational, not essential. Positivism and rationalism are built into the English language, whereas the Russian language is rife with negative constructions. Can you blame Russians for turning out the way they did? This is meant as a compliment, of course -- to the Russians.

No question, "Amerika" is a provocative book, one with which it is easy to argue. But it would be a mistake to give too much credence to its authors' often blithely ill-informed opinions. What's more interesting is what their views reveal in mirror image about what Russians think about Russia today. Their idea of America may be much more firmly based in reality than it was several decades ago, but it still serves the self-affirming purpose of myth.

Take, for instance, political correctness, a term that pops up, in one withering reference or another, in eight of the essays. In America, poet Grigory Kruzhkov says, mutual respect has destroyed artistic rigor, with people making such an effort to understand each other that they forget how to speak their own language. Try to get an American to parse a poem, Kruzhkov says, with English that has been run through the PC mill. Physicist and critic Anatoly Barzakh blames "the idiocy of 'political correctness,' the marginalization of culture, the flourishing of subcultures" on democracy in general, which undermines rigor and hierarchy by giving equal precedence to all walks of life.

Viktor Bogorad

Here, as elsewhere, there's a direct link between Russia's political failings and its cultural strengths. If American culture suffers from a surfeit of democracy and mutual respect, then Russian culture can only benefit from their absence, the logic goes. The America that these writers conjure up is more a different state of mind than an actual place. Perhaps that's why critic and short-story writer Oleg Dark says that "it is impossible to return 'from America' -- in one specific sense only: return the same person one used to be, unchanged." Those Russians who have emigrated to the West lose a certain basic understanding and empathy with their native people, as psychiatrist and author Artur Kudashev attests after meeting some former compatriots on a trip to the United States. "'Forgive me,'" one of them asks, "'but I just want to ask. What on God's green earth are you doing living there, huh?'"

Pose a question like that and you're bound to get a mouthful from the people who stayed in Russia. Linor Goralik, one of the collection's younger writers and a repatriated emigre herself, from Israel, launches into a tirade about "true" Americana -- Crayola crayons, plastic lunchboxes, contraception, anorexia, depression, born-again religion -- "that neither a green card, nor language, nor your little blue passport ... nor the Fourth of July fireworks and hot dogs can grant me." It's impossible for a Russian to achieve these things primarily because they don't exist -- at least, not in the pre-packaged American myth that Goralik evokes.

Imagine a flip-side collection of essays by American authors about Russia. Russians would no doubt rant and rave, accusing Americans of straying into territory they could never possibly understand. And yet, nothing stops such writers as Leonid Kostyukov from summing up America for this collection as "a land of fools" and Yevgeny Bunimovich from authoritatively characterizing it as a place where "geography takes the place of history." Which is why it is such a relief to come across the more balanced and informed contributions of psychiatrist Kudashev, popular novelist Max Frai, poet Sergei Leibgrad, and, especially, Oxford Russian professor Andrei Zorin, who rounds off the alphabetically organized collection with his subtle, nuanced and genuinely open-minded reflections on a semester spent teaching in San Antonio.

What is truly remarkable about most of the contributions to this ultimately valuable artifact of current Russian thought, however, is how little difference a trip to America actually makes. With some exceptions, the Russians in this collection conform to a ready-made opinion that is only confirmed by first-hand experience. "On the whole, in principle, there's no real need to travel to America in order to know everything you need to know about it, all that's useful to know for one's possibilities," poet Dmitry Prigov writes. For most of these writers -- and, one can only assume, the intelligentsia segment of society that they represent -- America remains to this day as real a way as ever of refracting Russian reality. Or, as Prigov puts it, "a point of extrapolative running-away in the hopes of looking back to understand one's home."