Books: Washington Is Halfway to the Moon

A Soviet dissident moves to the U.S. with "baggage in my head"

Avid Russian readers used to strip Soviet bookshops of a new novel by Vasili Aksyonov as if they were stocking up on candles before a storm. A first printing of 100,000 copies would vanish from the stores within 48 hours, and any magazine containing an Aksyonov short story, like his celebrated Halfway to the Moon, could count on the immediate sellout of a 2 million-copy press run. No other prose writer of the post-Stalin generation commanded such an impassioned following; no other offered a more radical departure from the standard Socialist Realist fare. His nonconformity came naturally. Aksyonov had been born an alien in the Soviet world. He was the child of Stalin's victims: his father Pavel, the former Communist mayor of Kazan, served 18 years in the Gulag, and his mother Eugenia Ginzburg wrote two books about her own 18-year ordeal.

The heroes in Aksyonov's books were teen-age runaways who craved rokmuzyka, wore Keds and dzhinsy and talked a nonstop street slang larded with Americanisms, just like real-life Russians. Predictably, Aksyonov's very popularity with the young made him suspect to the Soviet literary Establishment. Yet he remained a member of the Union of Soviet Writers for 18 years.

For the past two years, however, the authorities have systematically expunged Aksyonov's name from the annals of contemporary Russian letters. The reasons were not hard to find. In addition to his writing, he had been attempting to challenge Soviet censorship. His anthology of unorthodox Russian writing, Metropol, was denounced in the Soviet press as salacious and subversive. The Soviet secret police, the KGB, began to hound him in an effort to drive him into exile. In 1980, Aksyonov and his wife Maya succumbed to pressure and left the Soviet Union. His citizenship was then taken away by the Supreme Soviet, and the Literary Gazette announced that he had chosen "the path of betrayal to the motherland."

Vituperation sits lightly on the 50-year-old Russian, who has settled in Washington with his wife. Jaunty, good humored and fit, he jogs four miles almost every morning in the city's parks and around Capitol Hill. Extraordinarily productive, he has confounded every cliché about the predicament of the writer in exile. Although cut off from his natural readers, as well as from the subject matter of his books and the living language of his art, Aksyonov explains in fluent English: "I brought enough baggage with me in my head to last for the rest of my life." Since his emigration, he has written two novels, a film script and several short stories, all in Russian and set in the Soviet Union.

But the backdrop of his work is beginning to include the New World: "I see the vague outlines of a book—a Russian emigre in America harks back to his youth, reflecting on how he began to lose hope." He muses: "My disappointment in my own country has been so bitter. Our generation of writers hoped that after de-Stalinization started in 1956, we might restore Russian literature to its mother, European culture. But since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, there has been no chance of change. Now real writers don't even bother to submit their work to Soviet publishers."