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American literature: The 'sightless and hence doomed' West


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By Lev Navrozov
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

Monday, February 5, 2007

Dostoyevsky died in 1881 at the age of 60, Chekhov in 1904 at the age of 44, and Tolstoy in 1910 at the age of 82.

Who succeeded them in Russia?

Great poetry survived somehow up to the early '30s, but the ideological demands imposed on prose were much more severe, and prose died. Dostoyevsky-Chekhov-Tolstoy had no sequence.

Indeed, the Westerners in Moscow reported back home that Dostoyevsky was not studied at schools — and that was true. So he had been expelled by Stalin from culture! Then, after the death of Stalin, the Moscow Publishing House of Foreign Languages commissioned the new translation of Dostoyevsky's "Notes from a Dead House" to me and Jack Guralsky. Guralsky was an American who emigrated to Russia in the 1930s and was imprisoned because he had failed to inform on his friend, a British journalist, who saw on a Moscow newsstand a hymn to the chief of the Soviet Secret Police and sent it to his newspaper, the London Times.

The Times saw the joke and published the hymn on the front page. Well, having spent quite a few years in the "Dead House," Guralsky could perceive more competently Dostoyevsky's "Dead House" to which Dostoyevsky had been confined for four years, after a mock execution, for his revolutionary activity.

Before I had emigrated with my family, in 1971, to the United States, I had bought in Moscow Hemingway's "A Farwell to Arms" (which he wrote in 1923), and on reading it I concluded that great prose had migrated to the United States. The same remark applies to Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" (1937).

When I became a permanent book reviewer of "Chronicles of Culture," a magazine edited by Tyrmand, a Polish émigré, of "St. John's Review," and of "The Yale Literary Magazine," which my son bought on graduation from Yale, I anticipated a unique career: Now I would be a reviewer of great American literature. But great American literature was gone.

In Moscow, I had Irwin Shaw's play "The Gentle People" staged. It was a better play (1939) than any Soviet play. Published in 1979 by Delacorte Press was "The Top of the Hill."

It was worse than any Soviet novel. Propaganda? Yes, the narrator decided to drop his business and go to a resort "at the top of the hill."

On his way there, he knocked out the teeth of a passerby. In the real United States, this entails legal expenses and other complications such as prison. But not in the phony United States where to knock out somebody's teeth is a witty argument, or at least a good joke.

Irwin Shaw called Tyrmand who published my review and yelled at him hysterically. He did not attempt to knock out Tyrmand's teeth. Well, he knew he did not live in "Phonyland."

Not that American novelists go about knocking out everyone's teeth.

When I reviewed (pulled to pieces) John Updike's "Rabbit Is Rich," I received from him my translation of "Nature's Diary" by Prishvin, who was a contemporary of Chekhov, but survived in Stalin's Russia because his subject was nature.

Updike wrote a preface to the book, in which he explained that as he was leaving Russia after his tour, the Russian lady who accompanied him as a guide and saw him off, told him that the best souvenir for him she could think of was this book about Russia's nature I had translated. In his Preface, Updike praises my translation. A noble man. I am so sorry he is neither Hemingway nor Dostoyevsky.

In the 1970s, I was told that he would inevitably receive a Nobel Prize in literature. On March 18, 2007, Updike will turn 75, but the Nobel Prize is as elusive as it was half a century ago.

I had never read Saul Bellow in Russia. He received his Nobel Prize in 1976, at the age of 61. In the same year, he published "To Jerusalem and Back," and I was pleasantly surprised to find his description of my view of globally dangerous dictatorship versus carefree democracy.

Such lectures were essential for my income, and when I entered a lecture hall at Boston University, I saw him seated in a back row. "Mr. Bellow, I am as flattered as Chaliapin was when he saw from the opera stage Czar Nicholas II in his royal box." Bellow's response was instant: "Still, I hope that I will end better than he did."

What was his professional advice to me?

He studied anthropology and sociology at Northwestern University, from which he graduated in 1937. He could possibly have been known as a socio-political thinker of genius. When I started on my book entitled "This Is How the West Ends," he wrote to me (to me, not publicly) possibly what no other Westerner would write:

    I doubt whether you (or anyone) can restore the diminishing sight of what you call "the sightless and hence doomed" West. What one can attempt is to describe the condition in its fundamentals. This indispensable description if it is to be uncontestable will take more strength than any normal man has, for what we have is a probably fatal case of political poisoning, and the distortions and hallucinations it causes may be impossible to dispel. You must have more strength than any normal man has, or you would not have set yourself such a task. For many years he was disastrously poor, and he wanted to help me with his advice how to avert poverty. I had to write novels. There are situations when there are neither radio nor television, but a novel can always be read to kill time. As a novelist I would have the money to write and speak publicly whatever I wanted.

He was right in the sense that the greater has been the "China threat" — since 2001, in military cooperation with Putin's Russia — the less attention was drawn to the danger.

The book on which Bellow made such a unique private comment has been ready. But just try to publish it with him gone!

I have not considered Saul Bellow's novels great literature like Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, or Tolstoy in Russia and Steinbeck or Hemingway in the United States. He was an anthropologist and a sociologist, a socio-political thinker of genius, who wrote novels for the sake of his income.

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.

Monday, February 5, 2007

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