Northbridge, New South Wales, Australia Dear Yermolai, What an honour it is to be invited to share my thoughts with you, a well-travelled citizen of the world! I am looking forward to exchanging views with someone, older, wiser, and worldlier than myself, yet it feels slightly surreal to write half-way across the world to someone I have never met, whose surname I see on the most thumbed books in my room, and whose life has been played out in the public spotlight. I hope you will not mind if I am too intrusive in my questions or too abstruse in my subjects. But we've been invited to share our concerns, hopes, dreams, and ideas, which calls for rising above the trivial and the aphoristic. But this doesn't exclude the personal, and perhaps to this end I should first introduce myself a little. I am nineteen and, despite an exotic-sounding Inuit name, am completely Australian. Perhaps the closest I can come to describing our culture is to throw a few concepts at you: it is fairly laid-back compared with the work-ethic mentality of other countries, such as Japan; we like open spaces more than tightly packed cosmopolitan city living; we are very much beach creatures in the summer, due to an overabundance of magnificent surf coast; and personally I think we are as close to a classless society as one comes. This would have to be my favourite thing about Australia, the sense of social equality that is ingrained into the national psyche. Naturally there are exceptions, and here I must mention the Aboriginal community, the original inhabitants of terra australis who have been appallingly mistreated through our entire history. As a white Australian I am ashamed of our crimes against these people, but I think we are becoming more aware of our discrimination and are taking steps to redress the balance. I am studying composition and piano at Sydney University and have been playing the piano since I was three. I am almost hoping to get it out of my system by doing a music degree! In case you aren't a musician yourself, I won't bore you with details. However I cannot pass up the opportunity to ask your opinion as a compatriot of the great romantic and modernist Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Khatchaturian, and Shostakovich. When I was too young even to understand the technical prowess of these composers, I was still blown away by the power and raw passion that emoted so palpably from their music. Ignorant though I am on Russian political and social history, it seems to me that the credibility of emotion in these composers' works is directly related to the suffering they underwent under the communist regime and the great sadness they felt at seeing their beloved country falling apart under incompetent bureaucracy. (I am thinking of August 1914, when brave and patriotic peasant soldiers were sent to unnecessary death by senseless officers.) The principle here seems to be that not only understanding and development come through suffering, but also the ability to convey genuine feeling in art. Tchaikovsky's symphonies may not be to everyone's harmonic taste, but they have absolute integrity in their extremes of emotion. To give you an example, I was playing a Prokofiev piano sonata a few years ago. Reading up on its history, I discovered it had been written in 1909 during a politically turbulent period in which Prokofiev had taken great interest. Learning this opened a door to the music, as the angry energy and strident themes assumed new character. I had to reinterpret the piece accordingly. As a composition student (I won't flatter myself with the grandiose title of 'composer'), it is inevitable that one's feelings, moods, and current interests shape a piece in progress. Even if it is something as dry as an exercise in fugal style, you are bound to be influenced in some way by your disposition at the time. To me, the best music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been written by Russians. Liszt, in his happy meanderings through Europe, wrote pretty piano miniatures; Brahms, in his longing for Clara Schumann, wrote melancholy and pensive cello sonatas; but what shines from the music of Russian romantics is genuine passion, joy, love, even wistfulness in the more lyrical works. I would love to hear what you feel when you listen to these famous works that make up the rich musical heritage of Russia. Do you identify with them? Do they somehow represent or evoke what you have experienced of Russian (and Soviet) life? What do they say to you? In the same vein, I also want to ask about Russian authors. (I do realize that you are probably much more American than Russian, but perhaps your view will be doubly valid in that you have observed such things from two perspectives.) My mother loves the Russian novelists, notably your father, Doestoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and Pasternak; so I've had an easy opportunity to read their novels. Here the sense of genuine feeling that I noticed in Russian music is also apparent, but in the more clarified form of intense patriotism. Every writer is in love with the Russian peasant and his simple life, and full of admiration for his willingness to work hard. The customs and heritage of the Russian people are catalogued with much pride, and the sense of community is held sacred. I hope I am not universalizing many novels to fit a few formulae, but again the same phenomenon emerges: Russian writers have much to say about humanity, and forceful illustrations with which to say it that penetrate through the clumsiest of English translations. Australian literature, though definitely picking up in quality this century, was for a long time nothing more than the sentimental imaginings of settlers about life in Britain, or tales of drought and bushfire whilst trying to tame the land. Which endures most? That which deals with human behavior, observed at extremes by your countrymen. Please tell me if I'm romanticizing the situation there, or if I'm grossly ignorant of some Russian literary movement. Does my experience of these books ring true with you? Do you look on Cancer Ward , for example, as from a bygone era or as still relevant today -- particularly with the possible return to communism in mind? Is most of what is written today still politically metaphorical, and, if so, how has the literature of the nineteen nineties changed from the literature of the communist regime? Do you write? Poetry, short stories, novels? Does it have political significance or are you as a Russian writer no longer bound by conscience to either support or undermine the state? On a lighter note, I'd be interested to know which books and authors you are reading at the moment. This is an interesting way to get to know someone and their deepest concerns and motivations. I am tackling Joyce's Ulysses at the moment and like D.H. Lawrence for his brilliant and sensitive observations of human relationships. I'm also a devotee of Patrick White, an Australian who won the Nobel prize for literature a while back. He has a stream-of-consciousness style and is into realism in a big way. Not many Australians like him; but his style is superbly honed and there are many themes and threads running through everything he writes. But if novels are the bread of life, poetry has to be pure spring water. I have always had a soft spot for Robert Frost. Some might call him simplistic, but I think he was near the core itself: the bonds and the love and the reasons and the patterns governing a human life. Even small lines like "Spring is the mischief in me", "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches", and "Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the eager love that laid the swale in rows" remind me so much of small scenes and encounters that play through our lives. I imagine you have studied far more than I, so please share your tastes with me. On the subject of study you, at twenty-four, are looking at university from the opposite perspective. I would be interested in your thoughts about it. I suppose after one year I am disillusioned by uni: it is, after all, composed of the intellectual elite of society, people whom one hopes would be able to see that a sense of moral responsibility is necessary if any progress is to be made (to take many leaves from Václav Havel). Yet I look around me: graffiti is rife, signs in the library warn not to leave your bag unattended, people are raped in the lonelier parts of campus, and students have systems worked out for rorting exams. Is this peculiar only to this country where tertiary education is accessible and reasonably cheap? Or is it a sad fact of civilisation that advanced intelligence does not equal advanced ethics? In other words, is our ultimate human desire self-satisfaction, even if we know it is not always beneficial to the rest of humanity? I believe this is why communism eventually falls down: because not even the most high-minded ideologist can give the well-being of the community higher priority than his own gratification. I again must ask you bluntly if you agree here, as someone who has come much closer to this system than I have. In a country like mine, where there is little difference between the left and the right, not much ideology enters into politics. This is no excuse for my ignorance; it's simply the reason I hope you will enlighten me. I trust I haven't been too impersonal in throwing questions at you, and I hope you have got to know me and my undergraduate worries a little. Best wishes across the miles, and I look forward to hearing from you! Sincerely, Anouk |
Moscow, Russia Dear Anouk, One of the many bright sides of living in Moscow is that you can 'take in' an opera, a ballet, a theater performance or a concert on almost any night of the week, for anywhere from one to five dollars. We're talking world class quality. And sadness. Sadness for the paltry remuneration the artists work for, sadness for the significance of the admission price to many in the audience, and sadness for Russia. You write of the "wistfulness in the more lyrical works" of Russian music. Watching Tchaikovsky's Evgeny Onegin last night was tragic beauty, as it was meant to be, but with added 90's Russian twists: a schoolgirl using gutter language to show off to and complain to her friends between intermission cigarette puffs about her now utterly lost discotheque plans; the audience dispersing through pot-holed icy darkened streets, not certainly the social whirlwind of Pushkin's theater-going clan; winter fields, the rural life, the pristine province of the work replaced, a century and a half on, by an environmental time-bomb if not hell, by vodka drowning out what lyricism there is left in those expanses that fueled writers, composers, creators of our recent past. Yet through all that, enduring beauty had to hold the day in an entirely human triumph. Life breathes its logic; laughter rings. Great reversals, upheavals, extremes often cause true and therefore beautiful art. The turbulence can be national or personal, lasting or simply meandering. I have to agree with you that art dealing "with human behavior observed at extremes" has somewhat of a head start, although without guarantees of success, over straightforward description, musing, or reminiscence. Russian art has had plenty of that, and I am confident that undetected, somewhere underneath, it continues in this probing trek. But, on the surface, reality is one very much of stagnation, dirt, and loss of that which Russians say dies last, hope. The upturn has not begun to pump its course. Naturally the young are the exception, and Moscow is a further one; the province-metropolis rift is hard to overstate. The other day, three staggering older evening figures fell knocking on my car window. I reacted as most would in a city of ten million, somewhat aggressively. They asked if I had a single-use shot glass. Irritated by the situation, I rather audibly replied in the negative, to which the passably sober one cut back: "Look brother, don't yell; we all live in shit anyway." Off they went. Drunkards are drunkards the world over, but it hurts when their words ring true of so much that Russians tread in today. Much of it is our own fault. We did it to ourselves in 1917, and since. We killed millions and millions of peasants. Now a farmer who drank away his summer triumphantly proclaims that tomorrow (this was in November) he's slaughtering his only cow because he didn't store up on hay, and will have plenty of fresh meat tomorrow, but could we just pour him another 150 grams right now, it being a particularly cold evening. It's cold out there tonight as well, in March. We wiped out the class system. Now those wielding power, even if they did not enter the fray with the intention, play by the "this is your big chance to get rich so do it while you can" rule. It's the robber-barons all over again, except the land of opportunity, dreams, and the steppe is crisscrossed by corroding pipelines, radioactive dens, slumped posts, swampy roads, depleted tracts -- all scars of colossal rape. And there is no counseling, much less compensation. History does not always deal the fairest of hands. You were right on with your assessment of communism's collapse. Unfortunately, it seems that it is the same the world over: those who taste power and money grow easily addicted, and swiftly find the dominant logic of their existence to be a self-perpetuating pursuit of and service to those two masters. Nothing new here. It's just that in successfully structured societies, incentives, laws, enforcement and adherence to them aim to spread the benefits around, and some countries have done so quite effectively. Advanced intelligence and advanced ethics. That's the big question for the next century, and beyond. We fly to space; we concentrate tremendous power and speed inside the minutest circuitry; we probe genes, seeds, glands. Scientifically we're on a roll, a geometrical one at that. On the ethics front, however, quantitative approaches seem to fail us. Nothing to guarantee the reciprocity between intelligence and ethics. Perhaps it's all between the individual and himself, his God and his approach to knowledge. (Pardon the "he's," but it just writes so much smoother.) Over the West's last five hundred years, knowledge has been a commodity, but its recent explosion and the commensurate growth of its possible applications have contributed markedly towards its further commercialization. Ethics, on the other hand, is not easily marketable. We can't even classify it as a concept, a skill or a degree. One doesn't get a diploma in ethics. Mark Twain said once: "Let us not underestimate the value of fact: it may one day flower into truth." In this light, the benefits and demerits of formal education might better be weighed by looking at the paths and doings of its alumni thirty years down the road, rather than by their campus ways. Some reach that 'day' of flowering; some don't. Some never really saw the point. Who's to say who's more content? Not many would disagree that learning can continue throughout life, regardless of whether it was sparked, or dulled, by its formal stage -- which, like you, I am thinking about, not just from the "look back at university" perspective, but as a potential graduate student waiting for admission results and contemplating the advantages of deferral. Don't know what I want to do in the future, so don't see the logic of going to school just to go to school. I guess formal education depends on desire and profession. Also, you sort of need that piece of (undergraduate) paper. In university I studied Mandarin Chinese and have lived out there for a couple of years. I learned Russian from childhood, read a lot in the language, live in Moscow now and thoroughly enjoy it. It may be that life is really all in the process, not in the attainment. Without it, however, the process slips into something we, young people, all hope to avoid, though most of us won't: mediocrity. Not in a judgmental or competitive sense, but in the "look at your 40th-birthday self in the mirror" sense. Let me, like you, end with a trans-oceanic question mark that really swings that proverbial door wide open. Does an empirically rooted world suffice? Best of everything, Yermolai |