ON CREATIVE WRITING AND CREATIVE WRITERS

U.R. Bowie

Observations on Creative Writing and Creative Writers

“Writing shows its influences by the contagion of rhythm and pacing more often than by exact imitation of ideas. We know that Updike read Nabokov in the nineteen sixties by the sudden license Updike claims to unsubdue  his prose, to make his sentences self-consciously exclamatory, rather than by an onset of chess playing or butterfly collecting.”

                                                     Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Jan. 16, 2017, p. 84

Most of today’s creative writing in America is highly imitative, lacking the creative spark of originality. Writers imitate other writers: their themes, their literary form, their tone, everything. Much of what is published amounts to bad imitations of bad stories to begin with. The imitators apparently took the bad stories for good ones. A writer writes another bad story imitating a previous bad story. How does a writer avoid such a misfortune? Read the greatest writers who have ever lived. Read Lev Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor, Flaubert, Gogol, Rebecca West, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf,  many many others in the grand pantheon of world literature. If you must imitate somebody, try imitating them. Don’t bother reading ninety-five percent of living American writers, even the ones who have won awards.

Then there is the brilliant young writer who proclaims, “Why do I got to read all them old dead white men (plus a few dead white women)? Me, I got my own ideas!” How do we answer such a proclamation? We say, “Duh, yeah.”

About imitation. One thing that’s ever so hard to be is original. Good writers present something novel in tone or style; a good writer has his/her own voice. When you find your voice you have begun. Some writers never begin.

On The Envy of the Creative Writer

One day a writer of creative literary fiction sits down and writes a masterpiece. Other writers are plunged into sorrowful depression, thinking, “Dang, there are only a limited number of masterpieces to be written, and now this guy has filched another one and run off with it.”

                                                      Paraphrase of James Salter, The Art of Fiction, p. 50

As for myself I don’t even know what Salter is talking about here. I don’t have any feelings of envy whatsoever. Never have had. What’s wrong with me? I just read the brilliant novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Didn’t feel envious of him; just felt, “Wonderful, how great to have a young writer writing at that level of creativity.” Then again, I don’t know what writer’s block is either; can’t even conceive of not being able to write—unless I go blind or senile. Guess I’m just dumb.

What do good creative writers do? They “make the shape and rhythm of sentences intensely felt” (Salter, p. 56). Yes!

Then there’s the aspiring creative writer who proclaims, “I’m not interested in rhythms of sentences; I want to write about ideas.” Urggh.

Here’s the layman’s image of a writer who teaches creative writing in a university: “… a dramatic figure striking in appearance, wearing boots and jodhpurs, perhaps, with long white hair like a prophet and bearing a kind of literary ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods” (Salter, p. 57).

Can that white-haired prophet teach you to write? No, you have to learn yourself, through years and years of intensive practice, while reading only the best creative writers who ever lived and learning from them.

Salter mentions his friend Saul Bellow, who once remarked on “the sexual heartlessness of women.” As Salter says, “Women were especially on his mind at the time since his ex-wife—his third—was suing him for more money, given that he’d received the Nobel Prize with the six or seven hundred thousand dollars that came with it” (p. 58, 61). No big secret there—that women can be sexually heartless, or even just plain heartless, or mercenary, cruel or meretricious. But so can men. Welcome to the human race.

We Write Ourselves

“In a copy of a book that Colum McCann signed for an auction of first editions, beside the disclaimer that is always printed proclaiming that the book is a work of fiction, the names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, beside this McCann wrote simply, ‘Bullshit’” (Salter, p. 38).

Then again, you don’t want to get sued, do you?

Important Books and Unimportant Books

“Books that are important weren’t written to be important, generally. They became such. By important, I mean so-deemed. Referred to. I can’t think that The Catcher in the Rye was written as an important, life-altering or significant book. I believe that it was simply heartfelt. To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t bear marks of an intended importance although I don’t know what Harper Lee actually felt. Fitzgerald thought all of his books were important. The Great Gatsby was a short book, only 214 pages, and he was insistent that the publisher sell it at the same price as his longer ones” (Salter, p. 42-43).

Speaking of the so-deemed, the above paragraph demonstrates the sometimes dated opinions of James Salter. Read by everyone and his brother in the fifties and the sixties, The Catcher in the Rye is read by practically no one these days. Not only not important, but already moribund, almost dead.  To Kill a Mockingbird is still widely read, its so-deemed greatness still afloat, but it is “a book for children” (as Flannery O’Connor said), and for people who do not or cannot read real literature. As for The Great Gatsby, this book has claims to being the Great American Novel; it should be sold at twice the price of any other book.

Where and When You Write And Who Is Helping You Out

“You don’t do all the writing at your desk. You do it elsewhere, carrying the book with you. The book is your companion, you have it in your mind all the time, running through it, alert for links to it. It becomes your chief companion, in the real sense of the word, you can talk to it quietly. It becomes your sole companion” (Salter, p. 76).

What Salter hints at here is that, unbeknownst to you, the book is writing itself in your mind all the time. Your deepest neurons of the brain work on the writing day and night. As recent studies in brain science have revealed, on a conscious level we have no idea about the decisions those independent neurons are making. Romantic writers used to think of themselves as the amanuensis of the gods, who guided their pens and sent down original ideas. But more likely writers are the amanuensis of their own creative neurons. When your favorite character suddenly does something totally unexpected on the page, it’s not because God so decided. The neurons decided—and they very well may have made that decision at three a.m. in the morning, while you were fast asleep.

“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real” (Salter, p. 77).

Selected Passages from the Writings of Good, and Sometimes Great Writers

[description of a ritual butcher in a Ukrainian shtetl, inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he has butchered] “the glossy brownish organs . . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin” (David Bezmozgis, The Free World).

“Her light-brown hair was drawn smoothly back and gathered in a knot low on her neck, but near the right temple a single lock fell loose and curling, not far from the place where an odd little vein branched across one well-marked eyebrow, pale blue and sickly amid all that pure, well-nigh transparent spotlessness. That little blue vein above the eye dominated quite painfully the whole fine oval of the face” (Thomas Mann, “Tristan”). [Mann is great at describing human faces, human bodies.]

[description of a delicatessen] “there were glass showcases where smoked mackerel, lampreys, flounders, and eels were displayed on platters to tempt the appetite. There were dishes of Italian salad, crayfish spreading their claws on blocks of ice, sprats pressed flat and gleaming goldenly from open boxes; choice fruits—garden strawberries and grapes as beautiful as though they had come from the Promised Land; rows of sardine tins and those fascinating little white earthenware jars of caviar and foie gras…” (Thomas Mann, Felix Krull) [Mann is also great at describing a scene by accumulating masses of detail; in this he reminds me of Nikolai Gogol.]

“She’d never met a child with beady eyes. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment,

usually in middle age” (Lauren Groff, “For the God of Love, for the Love of God”).

“She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her buttocks” (Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes).

“A vast strand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day” (William Kennedy, Ironweed).

“joyfully gazing out from behind the cobblestone barrier are white crosses and monuments, which hide in the greenery of cherry trees and look from afar like white spots . . . . . when the cherry trees bloom these white spots blend with the cherry blossoms to form a broad seascape of white; and when the fruit ripens the white monuments and crosses are bedizened with specks that are blood-scarlet in color” (Anton Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov’s tone-poem novella, “The Steppe,” full of such brilliant nature descriptions, was much influenced by his friend, the wonderful landscape painter Levitan.]

“You know, I have an uncle who’s a country priest, and the man is such a believer that when, in time of drought, he goes out into the fields to pray for rain, he takes with him an umbrella and leather raincoat, so that on the way back home he won’t get soaked” (Chekhov, “The Duel”).

“there was something wooden about his walk, something like the walk of toy soldiers, the way he barely bent his knees and tried to make each stride as long as possible” (Chekhov, “The Steppe”). [Chekhov loves describing how people walk. Tolstoy, who loved Chekhov when he met him, marveled at the way Chekhov himself walked. “He has the walk of a little miss of the noble class,” said Tolstoy with delight.]

“In sadness there is some alloy of pleasure. There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy. . . . . Painters are of the opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh” (Michel de Montaigne, “We Taste Nothing Purely”).

[Desdemona, reveling in the stories Othello tells her about his adventurous life] “She swore in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange; ‘twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful. She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man” (Shakespeare, “Othello”).

BOOK REVIEW David Bezmozgis, "The Free World"

BOOK REVIEW

David Bezmozgis, The Free World, (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2011

As a child on his way to a new home in Canada, David Bezmozgis himself went the way of the fictitious characters in this novel. The book is set in 1978, and mention is frequently made of what is going on in the world at the time of the action. For example, “in Beirut, the Syrians were shelling the Christians, and Israel was massing troops on its northern border” (66). Meanwhile, “Begin was in America meeting with Carter and the Egyptian Sadat” (239).

The summit meetings between Sadat and Begin strike one as ancient history now, but the main characters in this book are even more anachronistic. They are denizens of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the novel depicts a special category of Soviets, Jews who have renounced their Soviet citizenship and emigrated abroad as refugees. The standard Western image of such people is that of persecuted, and rather heroic defenders of freedom. Surely there were such types, but Bezmozgis shows us normal human beings with all their flaws.

He shows us, moreover, that the refugee Soviet Jews are still Soviet Russians—from the ways they think and act down to the very ways they hold their mouths as they walk the streets of the capitalist West. Here is a typical description: “a man in his middle thirties, balding, slightly flabby, and with the typical Russian look of fatigue—acquired in the womb, marinated in that broth of disappointments” (337).  Imagine how hard it is to slough off that Russian look on any Russian face, “acquired in the womb.”

The main narrative line features the Krasnansky family from Riga, Latvia: the patriarch Samuil and his wife Emma; their sons Alec and Karl; Alec’s wife Polina and Karl’s wife Rosa. All are Jews except Polina, who ends up being the most sympathetic character in the novel. They pass through Vienna first, then take a train to Rome, where Jewish relief agencies will help place them in a new life abroad. They debate over where to go, which country to choose. Israel is, of course, one choice, but only Rosa wants to go there. Other places are much preferable, apparently, to most of the Soviet Jews living temporarily in Rome. One big reason is the political unrest in Israel. “Alec, having successfully avoided the worst of Soviet military service, wasn’t aching to go from Ben Gurion Airport to boot camp. Getting killed or maimed in Lebanon, or Egypt, or wherever the bullets were flying, seemed to defeat the whole point of leaving the Soviet Union” (66). The Krasnanskies eventually pick Canada as their destination in the free world.

Of the brothers Alec has a somewhat problematic name. Is this the Russian name Олег (Oleg, pronounced roughly “A-lek”), masquerading in English as a nickname of Aleksandr? If the character were Aleksandr, his normal nickname would be Sasha.

The two brothers are polar opposites: “Alec would see a circus and want to join; Karl, meanwhile, would estimate the cost of feeding the elephants and conjecture that the acrobats suffered from venereal disease” (33). Karl is the standard Soviet pragmatist and simulator-manipulator. Among Soviet Russians, and surely even among post-Soviet Russians, his type is legion. At one point he speaks disparagingly of a bus driver with “a sad and trusting face,” adding that “my face is whatever it needs to be” (34). The reader wonders what kind of face he will put on to wear around Canada when he arrives there. Speaking of faces, another incidental character, the kind and generous Lyova—who has already lived in Israel but is looking for a way out of that chaotic country—describes his own face as follows: “Mine is the archetypal Jewish face. Like something formed on the run and in a panic. Nose, eyes, ears, mouth: finished” (127).

Only a month or two in Italy, while awaiting placement abroad, the thuggish Karl is already involved in several business enterprises, some illegal. He brokers apartments to other arriving refugees, does a bit of money changing, operates a shady auto repair shop and traffics icons smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. His wife Rosa (the most undeveloped character in the family) tolerates his boorishness and occasional infidelities, devoting her life mostly to their two sons.

Alec, age 26,  perhaps the main character in the book, is notable for his frivolous nature, the way he makes light of everything. While Karl is out hustling for money, Alec prefers hustling for women. Early in his life he has discovered that women like him. “In his presence they often became exaggerated versions of themselves. The maternal ones became more maternal, the crude ones became cruder, the shy ones shyer” (4).  Alec and Polina have been married only a year at the time of the action; she has struggled over her decision to leave her parents and her beloved sister behind in Riga. Eventually Alec’s foolish decision to pursue a young refugee, the bad-news Masha, brings tragedy to the family and a likely breakup in his marriage to Polina. She decides to go on with him to Canada but divorce him upon arrival there.

Divorce, in fact, is rife among the Soviet refugees in Rome. As early as their arrival in Vienna, wives are abandoning their husbands, and affairs among the newly emigrated Jews are common. Some couples would have divorced years ago, but they remain together only long enough to get the documents allowing them to leave the Soviet Union. There are “the common occurrences of one man leaving his wife for that of a friend. This was then typically followed by threats and imprecations, and the obligatory loopy fistfight—the whole sorry spectacle played out before somebody’s distraught five-year-old son” (225).

For me the most interesting character in the book, and something of a tragic figure, is the patriarch Samuil. Despite his Jewishness, he has made a firm place for himself in Sovdepia, working a high managerial post in a radio factory. There he operates as a typical Soviet tyrant, who has a network of informants. He is also known to be a philanderer, apparently taking advantage of his high station to find willing women.

So firm is Samuil’s belief in Communism and the Soviet Way that emigration for him is a personal tragedy. He leaves because all the rest of his family are leaving, but so reluctant is he to emigrate that he contemplates killing himself in Riga. Once abroad, while waiting for Canada, he does nothing but grumble, eventually isolating himself totally from the others while writing a memoir of his life.

In a roundabout way, the author presents that memoir to the reader, shows us what a fascinating and even bizarre life this old man has lived. Samuil started out in a squalid shtetl in the Ukraine, where, as a Jew, he faced the horrors of pogroms and had to watch his own father murdered. In describing that early life, Bezmozgis features wonderful passages of prose. Here he describes the ritual butcher inspecting the lungs of a cow or sheep he had butchered:

“the glossy brownish organs . . . . . the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone­­—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin” (117).

Samuil’s whole life is replete with the dark sloshings of a dangerous world. Later in his boyhood he makes it to Latvia, where he lives with Jewish relatives and is radicalized by left-wing believers in the socialist way. In the summer of 1940, at age 27, he witnesses the Soviet takeover of Latvia, and greets the invaders with open arms. Working as a Red Guard he helps deport “unsavory” types: “Zionists, Latvian nationalists, capitalists, bourgeoisie, members of the former government, priests, rabbis, Hebrew teachers, everyone a potential threat” (174-75). Aloft in his dreams of a socialist utopia, Samuil never conjures up one iota of sympathy for the people he sends to Soviet labor camps. He and his brother Reuven, another true believer, do nothing to help their cousin Yaakov (a Zionist), even accompanying him to the cattle cars heading East. Given the Jewish blood that he has on his hands, it is no wonder that Samuil has no interest in emigrating to Israel.

Later on Samuil fights the good fight for the Fatherland in the war against Hitler. Now, late in life, he has no regrets about how he has lived, regretting only that his family has forced him to emigrate, betraying all his ideals and the Soviet system he still supports. His thoughts, however, are the thoughts not only of a Soviet-believer. Much of what he thinks is typical of aged thoughts anywhere in the world.

“How had it happened that the people in the past, all long dead, now seemed to him to be the real people, and the people in the present, including his own children, seemed to him evanescent, so nearly figments that he could imagine passing his hand through them?”(195). The old Jews newly abroad are truly touching figures. “They were all obsolete, a traveling museum exhibit of a lost kind: Stalin’s Jews, unlikely survivors of repeat appointments with death” (236).

Despite his doctrinaire personality and the sins of his Soviet past, despite his self-centered nature, his callous treatment of his wife and bullying of his own sons, Samuil is a believable character, and, in some dark way, even sympathetic. The descriptions of his death in Rome of a heart attack and his Jewish funeral and burial—attended by the secular Soviet Jews in his family, who have no conception of the Hebrew ritual, no idea what is going on—are probably the most moving in the novel. After the ceremony is done, they all end up singing the one song that unites them, a song Samuil himself would have approved of: the Communist Internationale (344).

Here is the fine description of Alec’s first viewing of the dead body.

“Alec approached the figure, drew aside the folds, and uncovered a wax replica of his father’s face. He saw the full head of gray hair, the stern brow, the distinguished masculine nose, and the shiny white granules stippling the cheeks. Someone had shut his father’s eyes and removed his dentures. The latter detail had distorted his face, collapsing his mouth and making him seem ancient. Alec’s impulse was to look away, but he resisted out of a duty to see all. He tried to reconcile this pale waxwork with the father who had been such a vital, dominant presence in his life. He felt crushed by the mortal paradox: how it was that his father lay by his side and that his father was no more. He studied his father’s face and understood that there was such a thing as a soul and that it had departed and left behind a corpse” (338).

Although the book is set in Rome and the characters are, largely, Jews, what one learns most in reading this book is how the Soviet mentality worked. Although describing events of the twentieth century (1978) the novel is already a sort of museum piece. Were these characters to return now, to the newly capitalist Russian Federation, they would be totally out of place. So much has changed in forty years.

What must it have been like for people who had never seen a banana in their lives and were suddenly swimming in bananas? Soviets abroad for the first time, including the Krasnansky family, are obsessed with bananas—not to mention “pineapples, or the chicken and veal in the butcher’s shops.” Then again, there is the thing of colorful clothing. Polina writes to her sister back in Riga: “What I hadn’t expected were the colors. There were dresses and blouses in colors I had never seen. How strange it is to think that I had lived my entire life without seeing certain colors. In one display there was a silk blouse of a deep lavender I associated with exotic flowers” (12). Anyone who visited the Soviet Union from the West in the seventies, the years of the “Brezhnev stagnation” during which this book is set, was immediately struck by the monochromatic nature of the place—even the capital Moscow: the greys and dirty browns, the absence of bright colors; the disrepair of the buildings. The grimness.

For Soviet people coming out Westward it must have seemed something like the ending of Tarkovsky’s film, “Andrey Rublyov”—when the black-and-white suddenly takes on color, and we feast our eyes on the magnificence of the Rublyov icons. The refugees sit dazzled by the light in Rome, speaking the Russian language, spreading rumors, just as they had back home. But these rumors are not concerned with when the hot water will be turned back on; they have a different content. “They compared climates. San Francisco was wonderful if you didn’t mind rain every day. Atlanta was forty degrees in the shade and you were lucky to find a white cop” (42). Although nothing is said about black people elsewhere in the book, Bezmozgis hints here at the standard racist attitudes typical of most Russians, including Russian Jews.

In Rome Alec watches a porno film for the first time, then muses over all he had been deprived of back home: “When it ended Alec grasped the full extent of Soviet deprivation. If Russian men were surly, belligerent alcoholics it was because, in place of natural, healthy forms of relaxation, they were given newspaper accounts of hero-worker dairy maids receiving medals for milk production” (151). Meanwhile, Russian folklore still rules in the minds of the protagonists: “I dreamed of shit last night,” Karl declared. “Means we’re due to come into money” (137).

Then there are all the nice set pieces about daily life in the U.S.S. R. 

(1) On driving a car Russian style, during the years when very few people owned cars and women did not drive: “In Riga his father had owned a car, a Zhiguli, which he drove poorly and infrequently. Arturs [his Latvian driver—the very fact of having a personal driver and a work car places Samuil up high in the Soviet hierarchy] took him to work, and when the need arose Samuil expected either Karl or Alec to drive him where he wanted to go. Otherwise the car sat in the garage, halfway across town. Samuil recorded the mileage on a pad to ensure that neither Karl nor Alec took the car out for their pleasure. It never occurred to anyone that his mother might also want to drive it” (45). The only thing missing from this account of ancient Russian history—which young Russians today would read laughing and choking on hilarity—is the tale of how Karl and Alec would likely make use of the car for sexual trysts, since in Soviet Russia the sexually willing faced the perennial problem of having nowhere to fornicate.

(2) On home improvement in the U.S.S.R. [actually apartment improvement, since people lived not in houses, but in government-owned apartments]: “Just to wangle ceramic tile for the bathroom, a man pitted himself against the mighty arsenal of the Soviet state. In effect, it was as if Leonid Ilyich [Brezhnev] was himself personally opposed to the tiling of a bathroom. It was the supreme challenge, eclipsing every other human endeavor—sport, sex, philosophy, art, and science” (211).

The Free World is often beautifully written. “They drove west toward Ostia. Ahead of them, beyond the horizon, the orange sun eased itself gently into the sea. Everything went orange in the expiring light. Orange-hued cars barreled along the orange-hued Ostiense until Dmitri pulled up and veered off onto a side road” (298). Sometimes there is a poignancy to descriptions of refugee life in Rome, as in the tale of the lost dogs: “The dogs, mostly large breeds, the mastiffs and wolfhounds favored by Russians, roamed in hungry, scraggly packs around Ladispoli, often congregating along the shore. They had been abandoned by owners who’d flown off to Canada or America—who after going to considerable lengths to process and transport the animals from the Soviet Union to Italy, had finally been dissuaded from taking them any farther. During the day, the dogs sprawled listlessly  in the shade of the palm trees, and in the evenings they skulked about in search of food. As with people in similar straits, the largest ones fared the worst. Great, once proud beasts dragged themselves about with downcast eyes, begging for scraps. To feed them was only to prolong their misery. Samuil had seen Italians shooing the animals away, using the Russian words for ‘no’ and ‘scram’” (242).

The novel depicts only one summer in the lives of the characters, and that is a summer in limbo. Soon they will arrive in their new home, Canada, and the reader wonders how they will get along there. Adept at Soviet conniving as most of them are [two of the minor characters among the refugees are the Bender brothers, an inside joke for readers of the popular Russian novel, “The Twelve Chairs” (by Ilf and Petrov, published in 1928), in which the main character is the conman, Ostap Bender], the implication is that they will do well. In speaking of low-life Masha and her family—her mother and her hoodlum brother Dimka—Karl remarks, “They’ll go to Germany. They can be smuggled in. I’m sure they’ll prosper. There’s plenty of opportunity. Let them be the Germans’ problem” (342).

The reader is frequently reminded that by far not all refugees are upstanding citizens and persecuted fighters for freedom. Like Dimka, some of them are common criminals who have done prison time in Russia. They are easy to pick out of the crowd, since they are festooned with the tattoos of the criminal underworld. “The unambiguous message from the Kremlin to the Knesset was: You want Jews? Here, take these” (184). When a Western country takes in migrants and refugees, it surely will be favored with some hardworking and upright types, but then again, the country ends up also inevitably with criminals, swindlers, and, worst of all, the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston. This problem underlies much of what Aleksandar Hemon has written, in his fictions depicting low-life Bosnian refugees in the U.S.

How much happiness, or unhappiness, awaits the Krasnansky family in Canada? David Bezmozgis would have to write a sequel for us to find out. Perhaps he is writing one. One may venture a guess, however, that the family members will find out that happiness in the West is not really at a premium either. Already their three months in Italy have been instructive in that regard. Lasting happiness anywhere, in fact, may be hard to come by. The epigraph to the book is from Genesis: “Now the Lord said unto Abram: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee.’” The title of the book is The Free World, something of an irony in itself, since there is not really any truly free world anywhere. The implication of the epigraph, however, suggests a different title, The Promised Land, and that title would be even more ironic.

Still in his early forties (born in 1973) David Bezmozgis has now published a book of short stories and two fine novels. Of the Russian/Jewish writers of fiction who have come out of the Soviet emigrations, he is probably the best working today.

CLOWN TRIP TO RUSSIA, NOVEMBER, 2016

The Mating Dance of the Blue-Footed Booby

                  Cathedral of the Ascension of the Lord, Kolomenskoe (Moscow), 1532

U.R. Bowie

RUSSIAN DIARY, NOV. 6-20, 2016

(VISITING THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION AS A CLOWN)

Nov. 5-6: On the Way There

Made a big decision late in 2016; decided to do something entirely different, go back to Russia with the Patch Adams Clown Tour, which amounts to a fortnight in the country (one week in Moscow, one week in St. Petersburg), entertaining children in hospitals and orphanages, as well as a few visits to homeless adults and a lot of madcap clowning on the streets. This year the group consisted of thirty clowns, from a variety of Western countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Italy, and the U.S.A., as well as several Russian clowns who joined us in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I was the only one in the original group of thirty who spoke Russian.

I left Jacksonville for Kennedy Airport in NY, dressed in the air-conditioned palm-frond hat that would be part of my clown costume in performance. People were looking at me, looking, probably thinking, “What the…” A few of them commented, “Oh, I like your hat. . . . oh, did you make it yourself?” As for me, the hat was my way of adopting the visage of a clown, making myself look ridiculous (that’s what clowns deliberately do). I felt ridiculous as well, and for the whole two weeks of clownery in Russia, I never got completely over that feeling.

On the long enervating Aeroflot flight from New York to Moscow I experienced a constant feeling of being superannuated, as if the world had passed me by. My first trip into the Soviet Union was 1972, forty-four years ago. In my capacity as professor of Russian, I had returned many times over the years, had even spent an entire year in the country as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching in the city of Great Novgorod. But even that was sixteen years back into the past, and in returning now, I was still operating, to a large extent, by old rules. While I was aging, staying mostly away from Russia since the turn of the millennium, new rules had emerged, and a new generation had caught up with me, passed me.

The Aeroflot flight was now fully a Western-style flight, complete with the sort of excess badinage that Soviet Russians had no tolerance for: the welcome abroad, the blather about the benefits of flying Aeroflot, and more. In front of each passenger was a complete home-entertainment system, which enabled one to watch countless things on a screen. The Russians knew how to operate this system; superannuated I did not. As I was to learn upon arrival in Moscow, the new Russian generation is as fully in thrall to computerized gadgetry as the whole rest of the world. Times have changed.

What better symbol of the spirit of Young Russia—and its congruence with the spirit of the capitalist West—than the “poverty chic jeans” (ripped in spots on the legs), worn by the young Russian woman who sat next to me on the plane? I was reminded of the times back in the nineties, when I was group leader for student study-tours in Russia. My female students, who went about wearing those ripped-up jeans, were the constant target of irate old ladies in kerchiefs, particularly when the jeans-wearers tried to enter churches or sites of patriotic importance. “They dress like that (complained the old ladies to me), and pretty soon they’ll have our young people doing it.” And exactly when it happened I don’t know, but now that “pretty soon” has arrived. At least while in Moscow and St. Petersburg this time, I saw no young men going around with their pants pulled down almost to their knees and their underwear showing. I suppose, however, that this American trend will eventually reach young Russians as well.

Nov. 6, Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow: Clowns Welcoming Clowns

Along with me on the Aeroflot flight were four other clowns in our group, including the leader, Patch Adams, 71, a man whose whole life has been devoted to making people laugh, to healing through humor, and to flashing the bare bottom to the prudes and frowners of the world. His first visit to Russia was way back in 1974, and now he takes clown tours all over the world. Patch wears his clown gear 24/7; he is never not a clown. He has long white hair, dyed blue on one side, pulled back in a ponytail, and a handlebar mustache. Wearing pink-framed spectacles and a big red nose, he goes about in multicolored garb, in oversized clown shoes, his clown bloomers pulled up to reveal long, spindly legs. He loves to dance on those spindlies.

Going through Russian customs has also changed radically from the way things used to be. I still recall the tension of Soviet days, when grim-faced young (always very young) customs officials took your Western passport and eyeballed you long and hard. Bags were almost always opened, and contraband (say, Playboy magazines) confiscated. Now the officials in the booths are polite, welcoming, and nobody checks anything, no bags are opened. We waltzed right on through. Afterward we were greeted by a committee of welcoming clowns, all members of our group who had flown in earlier, and all decked out in outrageous costumes. Tooting horns and sporting dead (artificial) fish, the clowns began dancing around, blowing up balloons. Russian bystanders, passengers, taxi and bus drivers, vendors looked on in amazement, clamping on their faces that old familiar Russian face-look. At least that hasn’t changed (I thought), the standard generic Russian look—compounded of equal parts morose, phlegmatic and disgusted.

Then Patch Adams took out and brandished a pair of supersized white underpants, labelled, “World’s Largest Underwear.” Four or five of the clowns climbed inside the supersized, and they went dancing around arm in arm, chanting, “We all go round in underwear, underwear, underwear.” Some of the clowns approached little children who were passing by, offering them balloons. Most of the children seemed bewildered and frightened by this unusual spectacle. They didn’t want to take the balloons. Eventually, some of the Russian audience lightened up, began taking pictures of the festivities with cell phones. But many seemed less than amused by this outburst of bizarre exuberance. I couldn’t help thinking about the age-old Russian distrust of skomoroshestvo, the wild clownery of the minstrels and gleemen of ancient Rus—always associated with pagan religions, with chaos and disorder, and censured, condemned, therefore, by the Russian Orthodox Church and the autocratic authorities. The Soviets as well, to put it mildly, were not fond of this kind of behavior.

Nov. 6: Consumer Capitalism

Way back in 1972, on my first visit to Moscow, the place impressed me as a huge, grim, colorless warehouse, mostly empty of products and barely functioning at all. Back in those days, and in the times of many subsequent visits to Russia, you always felt as if there were just too much Collectivist Socialism at work. The country was drowning in Socialism. But now, as I rode the clown van from Sheremetyevo back to our hotel, the Katerina City, passing scads of burger joints (Бергер Кинг, Корнер Бергер), fast food galore, passing one car dealership after another (Toyota, Mercedes, Audi, etc., etc.), passing reams of car washes, gigantic Western-style shopping malls, used car lots, everything under the grim, slate-gray skies of an early winter (snow all over the ground), I couldn’t help thinking that over the many years since I last spent time in Moscow—twenty years ago—the city had become mired in exactly the opposite problem: a surfeit of consumer capitalism. In the old days practically nobody drove a car, and all the cars on the roads were of Soviet manufacture. Now practically everybody drives a car, Western-made cars are available in abundance, but, as a result, the streets are clogged with traffic. No place is easily reached now by automobile; no place and at no time, except maybe in the middle of the night.

The Katerina City Hotel, in downtown Moscow, resembles in no way the kind of old Soviet hotels I stayed in for so many years. It is modern, efficient, the staff is polite, helpful, and they even smile at times—although despite years of effort to inoculate staff everywhere in the American smile, Russians still do not smile as much as Americans. The hotel, nonetheless (our home for a week in Moscow), is wonderful. The buffet breakfast, available to us every morning, would have been available nowhere in the Soviet Union or the Russia of the transition period (the nineties). The closest you could have found such a buffet back then was in Helsinki, Finland.

We arrive at the hotel in our van and are greeted in the lobby by scads of other clowns, who dance around and play the fool in their welcoming joy, yelling, “Greetings, Welcome, Namaste.” Among the thirty clowns in the group, six or eight are like me: newcomers to clownery. But at least five others are professional clowns, who spend most of their days every year being zany.

To top off the impression that Russia has adopted the conspicuous consumption and bad taste that originated in the U.S., I turn on the TV in the hotel room, and the first program I see is a take-off on the pablum/crap shown on American television. It’s called something like “Russia’s Got Talent,” with a meretricious girlie pop singer crooning out banality, and the judges then going delirious over her beauty and grace—spouting out long encomiums, reams of utterly insincere inanities. Yes. Welcome to Moscow, where nothing is the same any more, where—as everywhere else in the world—people are panting, gasping to embrace American crass stupidity.

I turn off the television and sit jetlagged and enervated, as I always am upon my arrival in this country. On a table by the couch there is a bottle of drinking water, Svjatoj istochnik (Sacred Spring). I sit and watch the ever-so-subtle vibrations of the water at the top of the bottle. There is something soothing about watching water in a bottle or glass as it silently ripples and shakes. As if there were some hidden tidal pull at work here, an artificial moon working its magic upon any liquid in any container, including the liquid that makes up 80% in the container that is human you.

Nov. 7: Sergiev Posad

I was elated to learn that our first day of clowning would take place not in Moscow proper, but in the monastery city of Sergiev Posad, located some fifty miles north of Moscow. Elated because I naturally assumed that we would drop in for a tour of the monastery after our performance at an orphanage for deaf, dumb and blind children. The St. Sergius-Trinity Lavra (Monastery), founded by the ascetic Sergius in the fourteenth century, has been a focus for Russian spirituality for six hundred years. No other spot in the country is more venerated in Russian culture. Forced to play a minor role in the history of the Soviet Union, when all religion was denigrated and forcibly oppressed, the Lavra regained its prominent place in Russian culture after the fall of the USSR. Nowadays it attracts pilgrims, people seeking a more spiritual life, others hoping for cures from dire maladies.

Much to my surprise, as our clown bus drove through the city of Sergiev Posad and passed the monastery on our left, no one in the bus even bothered to look at the complex of churches and bell towers. Utterly uninformed about anything in Russian culture, the clowns went on joking, jibing, playing the fool in the bus, while I tried to attract the attention of those sitting near me. “Look, look out the window to your left.” This was when I first fully realized what a fish out of water I was in this group. Not only the oldest clown (by far), I was also the only clown with any knowledge of, or interest in, Russian history and culture.

It was even more to my surprise, and chagrin, when I learned that there was not to be even a brief stopover at the Lavra after our performance in the orphanage. The clowns had another appointment for that afternoon and evening. Our bus was to proceed to the dacha/country home of Maria, the founder of a charity for orphans known as “Maria’s Children.” There would be a dinner at Maria’s, followed by a talent show, put on by the various individual clowns.

Reaching our destination, we left the bus and entered a huge, labyrinthine building, the children’s home for the deaf, dumb and blind. We divided up into groups of two-three each and went into small classrooms where the children were learning and playing. I paired off with Simon, an American from Topeka. Neither he nor I had ever tried clowning before; we both were novices. As it turned out, this first clowning experience set the tone for me, and probably for Simon as well. Both of us are low-key individuals, more introverts than extroverts, and our clowning was of the quiet type. Simon had a cowbell with him, while I carried a bag full of various gifts: writing pads, pens, crayons, a tiny flashlight, a rubber lizard.

There were five deaf and dumb boys in the first classroom, all sighted. The oldest, Kolya, had just turned six, and he already was learning sign language. The boys were happy to see us and eager to interact with us. Touching the children is important. I noticed this throughout the whole two-week clown tour: children love touching you and being touched. Here in Sergiev Posad they also loved playing with Simon’s beard and ringing his cowbell. The five boys colored with the crayons I brought. In addition to interacting with them, I spoke at some length with their teacher. She was concerned about the upcoming American election, worried about Clinton and Trump, neither of whom she liked. Unable to forget the past, the fact that today’s date was once the major Soviet holiday of the year (The Day of the Grand October Revolution), I said jokingly to the teacher, “С праздиком (Happy holiday),” but she replied, “Oh, we never think about that any more.”

We spent forty to forty-five minutes with these boys, who were much exited and entertained by our presence. At one point the teacher had them perform a little round dance for us. After we left this group Simon and I went into a different classroom. This time there were two girls, and three boys, all of whom were blind. Simon and I enjoyed getting down on the floor with the children. One little boy wanted to wrestle; I ended up flat on my back, with him crawling all over me. One little blonde girl, four or five years old, was extremely articulate. She would learn about your looks by using her hands to explore—her hands were her eyes. She found a little flashlight in my bag, started turning it on and off—talking all the time, asking questions—then she began directing the rays of the flashlight into her closed eyelids. Apparently she had some sensation of light.

My rubber lizard was a big hit with this second group of children, as it had been with the boys in the first room, who even began fighting over it. I hoped to keep it with me for future encounters with children, but one little girl latched onto it. I ended up leaving both the flashlight and the lizard. This first visit on the tour, at least for me, was perhaps the best visit of all. The children were so happy to have us there, and it was a joy to bring them pleasure.

Nov. 7: the Monastery

All day long I was still thinking antiquated thoughts. Today was once was the biggest holiday of the year in the Soviet Union, but now the Soviet Union was so far into the past that even Lenin was fast fading into total historical oblivion.

We had lunch in the cafeteria at the children’s home—the Russian staples: beef in gravy, mashed potatoes, buckwheat and black bread—and after that I made my decision. I would stay here in Sergiev Posad and visit the Lavra, rather than going on with the rest of the clowns to the evening dinner and talent show. On the way out of town the bus let me off at the monastery, and I stepped out into the brisk air. Snow and ice all over everything. The sky was of the slate-gray color that sets in sometime in the Russian fall and hangs on all winter. Stopping off briefly at a little church named after St. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa, I made my way up the slope to the main entrance into the monastery grounds.

Crossing myself, as was everyone else, I walked through the huge arch at the entrance and entered the inner grounds. It was already four o’clock, and the visitors/pilgrims were sparse. I took a look at the lovely little steep-walled Church of the Holy Spirit (fifteenth century). Wanted to go inside, but its doors were locked. Then I moved on to the Trinity Cathedral, built in the 1420s. Inside there was a service in progress, with a choir of harmonizing voices. People were stepping up to the big sarcophagus containing the relics of St. Sergius, founder of the monastery (he died in 1392), crossing themselves, bowing, kissing the box in various spots, stepping away, bowing, crossing themselves. The Trinity cathedral also has iconic frescoes on its walls, done by Andrei Rublyov, the most famous icon painter in Russian history. Later, on a visit to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, I would stand before his most famous icon of all, Christ the Saviour, depicted as a very real living man.

I went into one other church, the monumental Dormition Cathedral, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1559. By the time I emerged from that church it was already twilight—darkness comes early in the Russian fall and winter. I wandered around a bit more, enjoying the quietude, the peace of mind, then made my way back through the arch. Asking directions of a group of men who were smoking, I made my way up the hill to the train station. There was slush underfoot, snow had begun falling, and I was cursing myself for a decision I made that morning. Thinking that I would be largely inside all day, or on the bus, I had put on my running shoes instead of my winter boots.

Nov. 7: Women Working Behind Glass

As I approached the cashier’s box at the station, I had already begun laughing inwardly, because I was sure what would happen next. A lot has changed in this country, I was thinking, but the women selling tickets behind glass will always be the same. In Russia you constantly have to buy things by dealing with women who work glassed in; consequently, you cannot hear what they are saying. If you ask them to repeat themselves they are irritated, and then they begin yelling at you. I began by asking what a ticket to Moscow on the elektrichka (train run by electric wires overhead) cost.

She told me and I didn’t hear her. “Excuse me,” I said, “I don’t hear well.” Immediately indignant, she shouted out the price to me. I bought the ticket, but then asked her what platform the train was on. She didn’t want me asking that. She had better things to do than to tell me. Then I asked her how to get to the platform. Now, it would seem that all of these questions were legitimate—questions vital to the well being of the novice traveler. I had last been in the Sergiev Posad train station in 1983, so obviously I did not know my way around. But such questions in a Russian train station are not legitimate, and if you persist in asking them, the lady behind the glass will yell at you. She yelled. I suppose that this is the way glassed-in cashiers have operated for one thousand years of Russian history, and all the new Western ways that have recently penetrated the country—the service with courtesy and a smile that you run into (amazingly) everywhere—none of that counts for the glassed-in denizens of the cashier’s boxes.

Nov. 7: Russian Forbearance

 Back in Moscow after the fifty-mile ride on the elektrichka, I rode the metro to the Paveletskaja station, emerged onto the street. A young lady whom I had asked directions while riding the up escalator got out her cell phone, found a map, and sent me off in the direction of Shluzovaja naberezhnaja Street, where the Katerina City, my hotel, was located. Now, it was dark, the snow had turned to hard rain, which made for watery slush and puddles all over the sidewalks. Soon my running shoes were soaked through, and I began cursing in English as I sloshed along. With typical Russian forbearance people on the streets were stoically negotiating the sidewalks, doing their best to make their way through this mess. I was the only curser. Still not sure exactly where I was, I asked another man for directions, and he told me to watch for an underground crossing. It would bring me out on the other side to Shljuzovaja naberezhnaja. On I sloshed, still blaspheming, for several more blocks, and then I suddenly noticed on my left a little café called Оки Доки (Okie Dokie). That’s a sign from above, I thought. Everything’s bound to be okay now, and it was. Right in the shadow of the Okie Dokie Café I found the underground crossing and moseyed/sloshed on back to the Katerina City. Went up to the clerk in the lobby and told him, “Слякоть в Сергиев Посаде нормальная слякоть, но в Москве у вас самая прогрессивная слякоть в мире (The slush in Sergiev Posad is just ordinary slush, but Moscow has the most progressive slush on earth).”

Nov. 8: Worst-Case Scenarios

Our job as clowns involves not only being crawled upon by relatively happy, normal children. It also involves visiting children who are in terrible shape. Today we were in wards full of such children. In places like this, the zaniness of clownery simply does not work, and the clowns have to come up with other things to do. We entered a ward full of children in wheelchairs, all of them severely retarded. We tried touching them, singing to them. There was one little girl of four, Tanechka, with a bald spot on the back of her head, with vacant eyes. I was rubbing her back, singing a Russian song, when she suddenly went into a rage, began shrieking, slapping herself hard on the head, then biting into her own wrist. After being in this hospital for an hour we left, and I, for one, felt that I had not done anybody any good. But who knows? When the children cannot respond you can never be sure how much, or how little, good you have done them.

Nov. 9. Gob-Smacked

Back in the hotel, I was still tormented by insomnia, the usual result of the horrible jet-lag that always gets me in the first few days of my stay in Russia. Could not get to sleep all night, and, if that were not bad enough, I put on the TV and learned the results of the American election back home. As the reporter on the German English-language network DW put it: people all over the world have been “gob-smacked” (British English for “punched in the kisser”). So, as it turns out, the glorious American people, ever anti-intellectual—perpetually insisting on their God-given right to be mindless—have elected as their president a man who is not only immoral, but is proud of his immorality and adverse to thinking as well, a boor and a demagogue, a man utterly unqualified for the job. I can think of nothing better to do than to go down for breakfast wearing the rubber Trump mask that I bought in a Halloween shop and brought along with me.

Nov. 9: The Ascension of the Lord Cathedral

Today I abandoned my fellow clowns altogether, remaining in the hotel to sleep all morning, from nine to two. After that I went out to visit one of my favorite places in Moscow, the Kolomenskoe Architectural Complex, built on high ground overlooking the Moscow River. I haven’t been here in sixteen years, and meanwhile they have reconstructed the wooden palace of seventeenth century Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, but not at its original site. Today it’s too late for me to visit the new palace, but, then again, what I have come for is available at its original site, and still standing in all its white-stoned glory.

This is the Храм Вознесения Господня (Ascension of the Lord Cathedral, 1532), built, so the legend goes, by Tsar Vasily III, to commemorate the birth of his son and heir, Ivan—who would go on one day to be The Terrible. This temple is the oldest “hipped-roof-type” (also called tent-roofed) cathedral in the country. At 62 meters in height, for years it was the tallest structure in all of Ancient Rus. The sheer height of it is astounding, and the name Ascension is so appropriate: its white stone walls ascend. You stand below looking up at its sheer architectural power, and you feel like ascending yourself, soaring hand in hand with Christ up past all the kokoshniki (architectural embellishments in the style of the Russian peasant woman’s headdress) and onto the ever-narrowing tip of the thing and then BIF, disappearing (still holding the hand of Jesus) into the clouds. Слава Тебе, Господи, Слава Тебе, Богомати, I’ve finally got done with doing this business they call Life in Flesh; now I can finally soar up on high, where I can let go and have myself a nice, long rest.

Darkness was coming on, and no one but me was left standing alongside the railing of the slope that led down to the Moscow River. Just me and Jesus, standing looking up at the Ascension Church, enjoying being there with that temple, communing with Russian culture—with which I have communed for over fifty years now—contemplating the Ascension.

Nov. 10: Palliative Care

Today we visited the palliative ward of the Izmailov Children’s Polyclinic, one of the best Russian hospitals I’ve ever been in—very clean, good equipment, reeking in efficiency. But then, all of the hospitals and orphanages we visited in the two weeks of the Patch Adams Clown Tour were way above average. I know this because—while working as a volunteer for the Red Cross in the nineties—I have been in many such institutions, both in Russia and in Central Asia. Some of them are gruesomely bad, dirty, with broken windows. Not sure whether the Western organizers of the Patch Adams Tours are aware of this, but the renowned Patch Adams is shown only the very best hospitals and orphanages.

Palliative care (same word used in Russian, паллиативный), is care intended to palliate, mitigate, alleviate pain. But the word “palliation” has now taken on the meaning of care of the dying. In visiting here we were dealing with dying children. What to do for them? That is the question. Another: does anything we do for them really help? Hard to tell.

Working in tandem today with Guillaume (Giyomshchik), a big-eyed professional clown from Montreal who has a handlebar mustache and a long, disheveled goatee, I approached the bed of a girl called Eugenia. According to the chart on the headboard she was eleven years old, but she looked more like five. Matchsticks for legs and arms, with skin chalky white, continuously kicking side to side with one Auschwitz spindle leg, she lay with wandering eyes. Using her pet name, Zhenechka, we improvised a song that consisted largely of that name plus various endearments. After getting Giyomshchik into the rhythm of the thing (“Zhenechka, slavnen’ka, Zhenechka”), I let him carry on with the melody while I switched to harmony. Did the dying Zhenechka, she of the one spasmodic leg, hear the song? Who knows?

Throughout the day I was developing a bronchial cough; I could feel an old chronic friend coming on: bronchitis. Many times over the course of the years, on my visits to Russia, the strain of the jetlag and the lack of sleep has brought on this ailment. I was hoping this year to avoid that same old same old, but it was not to be. At any rate, I was thinking in the palliative ward, let’s hope that I can spread a helpful virulent germ around here today, thereby hastening the departure of sufferers like Zhenechka for the next world.

Nov. 11-12 : Bronchitis

Badly sick for a couple of days. Hung out mostly at the hotel, trying to get better. I missed the clowning at a homeless center, which I would have liked to go to, as it was the only visit in the whole tour to an institution for adults. But knowing I had only two weeks in the country, I rebelled against spending most of the trip in bed. Slept all morning, then took a jaunt down to the Novodevichy Nunnery to visit “Russia’s Preeminent Necropolis” (headline in Moscow Times). Hadn’t been here for many years. The graveyard is notable for its spectacular sculptural monuments. Today many of them were covered in snow, which makes for interesting effects on the tombstones.

Came upon the renowned humorist, longtime director of the Moscow Circus, Yury Nikulin, who (in the sculpture) sits there on his backside, now perpetually holding a lit (supposedly) cigarette but never taking a drag. The dog at his feet was completely buried under the snow, but someone had kindly dug him out.

It was very cold and I was sick, so I gave up searching for the many famous Russian writers whose works I taught for thirty years in an American university. I had seen them anyway—the graves and monuments of Bulgakov, Gogol, Chekhov, Mayakovsky, many others—on previous visits here. I did find the grave of the great singer Lidia Ruslanova, and one of her songs, which I know by heart, “На улице дождик—Rain Outside”—kept running through my head as I stood there.

Today I missed the grand gala ball and auction for the charitable organization Maria’s Children.

Nov. 13: On to St. Petersburg

The Bunin Allée (Avenue with Trees)

The nicest thing, perhaps, that I discovered during my stay in Moscow was the existence of a new metro station, called “Бунинская аллея (The Bunin Allée),” which is way far southwest of the city, the last stop on the line. I’m the only clown who would take note of such a station, named after the arbors and tree-lined boulevards (linden-lined, birch-lined) in the works of the writer Ivan Bunin, but, then again, I’m the only clown who wrote, years ago, a Ph.D. dissertation on Bunin at Vanderbilt, and then who spent thirty years translating his literary works—published, finally, in 2006, by Northwestern University under the title Night of Denial.

Nov. 13: Musings and Cogitations While on the Bullet Train to Petersburg

Since the fall of the Soviet Union this country has become so much more civilized. I never thought I’d see the day when Russians on the streets were not yelling constantly at one another, playing the age-old Russian game of yell. Now the yelling women behind glass are the last of a dying breed. Or the day when drivers stopped to let pedestrians cross. The old (unwritten) rules stipulated that drivers—intent on claiming their right to the highway—would always speed up when they saw pedestrians. “Get out of my way; I own this road!” Now new laws have the drivers in rein. Big fines. They stop and let you cross. Civilization.

I last rode a train between Moscow and St. Petersburg twenty years ago. In those days things were much the same as in Soviet times. The train took eight hours for the trip. You usually went overnight and slept the journey away in sleeper compartments for four. The conductor would bring you tea. Not a bad experience, but the trains were slow, and the toilets consisted of a drafty compartment, stinking horribly, with a hole in the floor.

Now you ride a chic bullet train, clean and comfortable, with civilized toilets, and you make the trip in three-four hours. In the old times nothing was ever compatible with Western standards, but riding this train today, you could as easily be riding in France or Spain. Amazing, the progress of civilization.

Yet, as I sit on the train, looking out at the snowy countryside, I’m musing over the failure of Homo sapiens ever to make much progress. All the “going forward” that we talk about so incessantly never really gets that far forward. Why such gloomy thoughts? Because back in the States, with the election of Trump, we’re into a big New Era, a chance for Real Change, which Change could be going more backward than forward, which Change could even be Dangerous. Would that there were a way to stop the mutual back and forth of hatred that rules the U.S.A. One half of the country grits its teeth and shakes its fist at the other half, and that other half grits its teeth back and shakes its fist back. How did we get into this grievous situation? Don’t exactly know. What’s to be done about it? Don’t know that either, but I do know that real progress in terms of how the human psyche operates, real progress in human endeavors—notwithstanding the presence of wonderful new fast bullet trains—is the thing that never happens.

I’m nursing my bronchitis with vodka, the brand called “Air” [Воздух (пьешь как дышишь)], aware that vodka will not palliate my dark thoughts about the human race, and taking note of the warning on the bottle: “Чрезмерное употребление алкоголя вредит вашему здоровью (Excessive use of alcohol ruins your health).”

Nov. 14: St. Petersburg

Walking Tour

Upon arrival last evening at our hotel (The Rachmaninov, on Kazanskaja Street), I led five other clowns on a brief walking tour of my favorite city. We trekked through the snow, passing first the Kazan Cathedral, right next to our hotel. I pointed out the Saviour on the Blood Church, just down the way along Griboedov Canal. Then we walked Nevsky Prospekt all the way to the Palace Square and Hermitage Museum. To the left from there we went scrunching along the pathways packed down with snow, past the Admiralty Building, on to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, all scaffolded up at the top. From there we took a right turn and proceeded to The Bronze Horseman, the most famous statue in all of Russia: Peter the Great mounted on his horse, right arm stretched forward, squinting to make out the horizon, since one eye (the left) was all snowed over.

Katya

Today we visited two different hospitals, first the one named after its founder, the Austrian doctor, Carl Gottlieb Rauchfuss, second a children’s hospital specializing in ambulatory problems and prostheses. At times on our visits I just sit back and watch the other clowns in action. Watch the children having fun. So many of these clowns are so good at what they do; you can’t help admiring them.

Maybe the highlight of my whole trip was something that occurred in the first hospital today. Here the rooms and corridors seemed to be teeming with very active, lively children. In the ward I first entered three small children were running and jumping, screaming and laughing at the antics of the clowns, while sitting alone on her bed, a girl of ten or eleven, brown-haired, very serious, wearing glasses, concentrated on a book she was reading. Her name was Katya.

               

The little children squealed, ran, jumped, while Katya sat, and the disconcerted expression on her face said, “Leave me out of the festivities; I want no part of this.” Several clowns approached her, in an attempt to get her involved, but she ignored them, kept her eyes on the book. She seemed to be thinking, “If only they’d finish their foolishness and leave me in peace.”

               

Eventually a nurse came in, had Katya on her back in the bed, administering to her in some way. Clearly uncomfortable with the procedure, the girl lay with tears in her eyes, while her book was left at the foot of the bed. It was “Stories from the Bible.” What to do? This. I walked up to Katya on her back, looked down at her and began to sing. It was what they call духовная песня (a spiritual song/prayer), sung by peasant women in Russian villages of the nineteenth century.

First verse: Миру заступница, Мати Всепетая, я пред Тобою с мольбой

(Intercessor for all the world, All-Hallowed Mother of God, I stand before Thee with a plea)

Second verse: Бедная грешница, мраком одетая, Ты Благодатю покрой

(Poor sinner that I am, all wrapped up in darkness, cover me, Mother, in Thy Bright Grace)

Third verse: Трудная жизнь, минуты страдания, Ты мне, молюсь, помоги

(Hard, hard life, moments of dire suffering, help me, O Mother, I pray)

She lay on her back, looking up with utter concentration, listening to the consolation of the song, listening. We never spoke a word together, but in leaving Katya, I hoped I had left her with a spark of succor, a way through whatever dark paths in her soul that she still had to walk.

Nov. 15: Dasha, Roma and Tima, Trump

We visited two children’s hospitals today, both great fun. One was the Institute for the Treatment of Bone Tuberculosis. Here Courtney (an Australian clown) and I spent time talking to a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl named Dasha, who was not ambulatory. She had a lovely temperament and a great smile, and she did her best to speak English. At times I helped her translate things she wanted to say for Courtney from the Russian. I left her with a necklace made by Native Americans, with two feathers hanging down at the bottom.

The Trump mask was a big hit here, more than anywhere else. Almost all the nurses and mothers wanted their picture taken with Trump. By now I had a performance routine down. I went around speaking out the mouth of the mask in Russian, asking somebody to help me find my pal Putin. I repeated the same words over and over. “Меня зовут Трамп. Я шут гороховый. Я первый шут гороховый Президент в истории Америки (My name is Trump. I’m a jackass-clown. I’m the first jackass-clown President in American history).” After that I sang “America the Beautiful,” beginning in English, but finishing off the last verse in Russian.

Made friends in the morning with a six-year-old boy named Roman (Roma). Gave him a calendar for 2017 consisting entirely of cats. He was thrilled. He told me, “My favorite animal is the cat.” Also gave him a writing pad and pen. His specialty in drawing was the tank. He drew me a picture of a tank, very carefully wrote out his name at the bottom, Рома, and presented it to me as a gift.

The highlight of the afternoon was three-year-old Timofey (Timothy). As clowns in multicolored outfits gamboled about, Timmy sat with his mother, dead serious, wide-eyed, muttering. “What’s that he’s saying?” I asked, and the mother, laughing, replied, “He’s saying Паук-человек (Spiderman).” So it turned out, Timmy was obsessed with the superpowers of the man-spider, and he was convinced that somewhere amidst this cornucopia of bright clownery his hero would appear.

Nov. 17: The Catherine Palace in Pushkin

Today we rode our bus out of town, to the city of Pushkin. There we visited the magnificent Catherine Palace, which I had been to many times, but never like this. The clowns capered and romped about in the magnificent parade rooms, danced amidst the splendor. I got to see the wonderful Amber Room again, and then we were off to the Psycho-neurological Orphanage No. 4. All the children here were severely retarded. Even the most experienced clowns are sometimes at a loss in a situation like this. The usual tricks—dancing about, blowing up balloons, tooting horns, singing songs—if they work at all, only work to a limited degree. You try to make the best of a sad situation.

Nov. 18: Winding Down

Our last visit to a children’s hospital this morning. I talked for a while with two six-year-old twin brothers, Misha and Matvej (Mikey and Matt). Passed out a lot more presents (calendars, crayons, writing pads, even toy cigarettes). One last go for the Trump mask, and once again it was received with hoots of joy. Everyone was posing for pictures with Trump. As for the children, the younger ones didn’t know who Trump was, but they enjoyed the mask. Mikey and Matt started playing run out of a ward shrieking, then run down the corridors pursued by the ogre in the mask. Great fun. Before leaving this hospital I gave away most of my clown props, including the palm-frond hat and the fake eyeglasses that I had worn most of the time. Assuming that it might be useful some time in the next four years, I kept the Trump mask.

Summing Up

There were times during this trip, especially during the worst bronchitis, that I wondered what I was doing here. Especially since at my age I was like grandfather to the group. But all in all, it was a wonderful experience. The clowns were so devoted to what they were doing, and such good people, it was a real privilege to be around them. Some of them were so refined in their performances that I sometimes just sat with the children and watched the entertainment.

I spoke with a lot of Russians all over about the American political scene. Didn’t meet a single Russian who liked Hillary Clinton; most of them hated her. But that is understandable, given that her husband as President was the first to perpetuate the Cold War by pushing NATO up to the borders of Russia, and given that Hillary followed the same anti-Russian “containment” policies as Secretary of State under Obama. As for Trump, the Russians appreciated his iconoclasm and showmanship, but they weren’t really sure what to make of him. But then, nobody else can figure out Trump’s behavior either, including Trump himself.

The best thing of all about this trip was the privilege of being able to interact with Russian children, with their mothers, with the nurses and doctors in the places we visited. In one hospital a woman there with her son, just checking in, said to me, “But you’re from America; they hate Russians in America, don’t they?” Well no, not all of us, at any rate. And if we could bring the haters along with us on this tour, could take them to the hospitals to see the children, the hatred would soon fade from their souls.

                                           


                                      Griffin Statues on the Bankers Footbridge, St. Petersburg