a funny book, anyone?

[Olga Meerson]

Yurij Koval'--anything, but especially Samaia legkaia lodka v mire, as well as his short stories. Kept thinking about the period and realized:
(a) I was born a year before (1959)so raised during those years;
(b)I left the Soviet Union at 15, in 1974, and, by that time, had had some sense of humor, almost all of it, thanks to the books I had read and shared with my parents, brother, and friends;
(c) Most of the truly funny stuff--i.e., what is still funny now-- (by the way, also people like Vladimir Maramzin, Khvostenko, etc.) was actually WRITTEN  during that period;
(d) The reason I read it in my youth was because it was accessible in Western editions or/and in samizdat;
(e) the reason I had read it even before my emigration was because my generation was raised on samizdat and--those who stayed in SU until 1989, eventually, on Tamizdat. But gradually, both of these became not even authors we liked but the authors we ourselves were! There was a conflict-of-generations joke in my days: a friend visits some paterfamilias busy typing up something on his typewriter:
'What are you doing?
'Typing up War and Peace.
'Why bother? Buy it!
'I need to introduce the Classics to my son and he refuses to read anything but the Samizdat. 

There are many other anecdotes, from our own lives, this joke has summed up. I think, Russia was a very reading society precisely in those days--when reading anything worth reading was an illegal activity. But as a result, that was also a period of authors thriving. We didn't like what was there, so we wrote what we liked. By "us", I mean my generation and slightly older, not myself. I am not a writer but I have been blessed with being among the first readers of many of my contemporaries, such as Siniavsky (can be very funny, by the way!), Dovlatov, Iskander, Volokhonsky, Brodsky, Voinovich, Galich, Okudzhava, Yulij Kim, much of Vysotsky, Oleg Grigoriev, and  Venichka Erofeev. (There were others). None of them were published in the USSR then  (although you could legally listen to a small portion of Vysotsky, whatever was used in film at the time; same is true for Kim but much of his stuff was used anonymously even then, as he was very active with the Khronika tekushchikh sob!
 yt!
ij; but he also taught and his students adored him), but everyone who knew them read them, and "disseminated" them ("disseminated" is the word they used to incriminate you when they arrested you for spreading the Samizdat!), and it is their names that we all know now as the culture and literature of the 1960s and the 1970s, and even early '80s (although for me, that was already in the West, so I can only testify to the fact that the tradition continued but I knew it first-hand only in the '70s; besides, people like Dovlatov, and many others who wrote a lot in the '80s eventually became very popular at home).  When I first became a graduate student at Columbia (1984), I was amazed at the poor representation of any of them in courses taught on 20th C. Literature. Eventually, things have evened out, but originally, what we really read and what our country published rarely coincided--and what was taught in the West was what our country published. As for people from the 1930s etc!
 .,!
 as great as Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrey Platonov (and Varlam Shalamov, rarely funny but often witty, in his own, macabre way), we all knew them but few official curricula at American Universities taught them. I still remember FIGHTING for the worth of teaching the Master and Margarita (not even a favorite of mine!) and any translated Platonov, to our own students at Columbia, as late as 1985! When Irina Reyfman came to teach with us things changed a little--as, in her Russian hypostasis, she was already raised on the same stuff I was. before that, the gaps and rifts between my view of contemporary Russian Literature and our curriculum had been  huge, even then and there, except, perhaps, for Solzhenitsyn and, first, Zhivago. Both of these were known in the West way before Platonov and even Mikhail Bulgakov. The latter were considered part of the Counter-culture, and therefore taught only as such. Definitely not as Russian classics. As for Iskander, I still remember how he c!
 am!
e to New York, for the first time, perhaps around 1982, certainly not later than 1985, and only Russians knew him, although Tony Morrison got to introduce him--quite appropriately, I think. It was at the CUNY Grad. Center and people there knew what they were doing then. But otherwise--90% of the audience spoke and read Russian, and there were very few people who knew Tony Morrison herself! Sad but symptomatic.     What really mattered was not what was officially published, and therefore, up to a point, hardly recognized in the West. Testimonial literature made it first. and not all of that too: Solzhenitsyn but not Shalamov, etc. As for funny stuff, there was plentry but little available through official channels. The best publication in the West to see this process was, I think, in Paris (1977ff), by Vladimir Maramzin and Laxei Khvostenko: the journal called "Echo", with the Pushkin poem as its epigraph. It has many funny things in it, including the very first publication o!
 f !
people as funny as Oleg Grigoriev. It feels odd to talk about these things that once used to be obvious. I guess, that is one of the perhaps-not-so-negative effects of getting old: what, in your own culture, used to be self-evident needs to be stipulated and perhaps codified. As a result, we have an overview of a culture of sorts.
o.m.

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