In Soviet Russia, I did not want to be involved in any humanities, including the arts, because all were tainted with propaganda. So, at the age of 18, I enrolled in a technological institute to become an engineer. Nuts and bolts are free from propaganda, you know.
But our destiny awaits us at the most unlikely places. At the institute we were to study English to be able to read the American literature in our field. Thus I learned enough English to understand the foreign English-language broadcasts (the foreign Russian-language broadcasts were jammed). What I heard one day changed my life.
A Soviet sailor jumped off his Soviet warship, swam to an English merchant vessel and asked for political asylum, which was granted. Then an armed crew from the Soviet warship boarded the English vessel, found the fugitive and said that he was a thief.
In vain did the British captain explain that the sailor was now Her Majesty’s subject and the Soviet authorities were to sue him in a British court. The Soviet crew dragged the sailor back to their ship.
But lo and behold! A British squadron came up, surrounded the Soviet warship, found Her Majesty’s new subject and took him to England.
I was transfixed. Britain was risking WWIII because of a Soviet sailor, a semiliterate Russian, possibly a thief. Of course! Habeas corpus! "You must have the body (corpus) of that person! Give it to us, come hell or high water or WWIII!"
I dropped the nuts and bolts, and began to study English. Finally, when I entertained an Anglo-Saxon company in the mansion of Ed Stevens, an American correspondent, and his wife, Nina, Ed announced that I was a Russian. No one believed. Mrs. Reston (the wife of a brother of James Reston of the New York Times) later explained: "Your face was so American – so arrogant. No Russian can have such a face."
My problem was to make a living. But how? I could not go to the U.S. Embassy and declare that I am an American – look at my face! So I decided to be the first Russian translating Russian classical literature into English without ever having lived in any English-speaking country. To the Publishing House of Literature in Foreign Languages I went to offer my services.
All its translators into English were emigres from the English-speaking countries. Their consensus was that a Russian can translate only from English into Russian, but not Russian classical literature into English.
But I and the chief of the English Department fooled them. My translation was submitted to them anonymously, and they decided that a new emigre from an English-speaking country had come – possibly an English journalist or author.
Thus I joined their community, and one of them, Jack Guralsky, a former American, became a lifelong friend of mine. Why had they emigrated?
Before Jack came to Stalin’s Russia, he had hated America. And how! He was an extremely gifted man. But he wasted his time at an American high school, because everything American seemed to him ludicrous.
Listen to the American composers! Go to the American theaters! My God! They don’t have even premises and companies of their own! Where is their Stanislavsky?
The Depression was the culmination of everything worst in America. Jack emigrated to Stalin’s Russia, where the emigres tangoed and fox-trotted from restaurant to restaurant (and the police were ordered to protect them from traffic).
Yet soon he was arrested for his friendship with a British Times correspondent whose article enraged the chief of the secret police himself. Jack was sentenced to 25 years in the labor camp, but was released after Stalin’s death in 1953. This is when we met, and he quipped: "Stalin’s labor camps broadened my political vision. They were worse than even the Depression."
Ironically, this hater of America, an American bum, a school dropout, did credit to America. He taught himself to play the piano to perform his favorite music, from Bach to Brahms, at a professional level. He learned German to read the German philosophy in the original. He did not become a writer (only a translator of Russian fiction and poetry), but his oral vignettes were brilliant.
Thus, when he was with his father in Japan, their mailman had a pair of Western trousers, but had no jacket and wore a kimono. Jack’s father gave him his old jacket. It was several sizes too large for the diminutive Japanese, but he put it on kimono-like, looked in their mirror and said: "Oh my, I look like Oscar Wilde.”
Jack re-emigrated to the United States in the 1960s.
Another interesting emigre among my new colleagues was Rosie, a great-granddaughter of Karl Marx. Her husband was an orthodox Canadian Communist, and her pedigree was perhaps one of the reasons why he had married her.
She was near 60, I was in my mid-20s, but my seditious talk looked like seduction – her face was flushed and she would scream from time to time: "Oh, you are crazy!”
"Rosie!” I would say. "Your famous ancestor was a very intelligent and erudite person. But he was a German. He did not understand the importance of the English Magna Carta – the protection against tyranny, absolutism, dictatorship. The society he devised may be beautiful. I saw the picture in a magazine of the ‘20s. All the work is performed by machines, while humans sit on the slope of a mountain, one of them painting, another playing an instrument of his own invention, and still another experimenting with test tubes. But the absence of protection against the dictatorship spoiled it all.”
"Oh, you are crazy!” she would scream, all aflush.
But on one point she was adamant. "Yes," she conceded in a whisper, enhancing the impression of seduction, "here it is a failure. But there? You don’t know because you have not lived there. Out there we did not understand this country either. There – all life is about money and all life is money.”
She never re-emigrated to the West, and she loved to repeat the Russian proverb: "Life is fine where we are not." "The distant pastures are the greenest," I echoed in English.
Still, when the Austrian airliner with me and my near and dear touched the asphalt of the Vienna airport, we were sure, no, not that the airport was paved with gold, but that its asphalt was better than gold.
This column above is in the spirit of my book, which is not only a book of political insights, but also a book of personal existential experiences. The link to my book on-line is www.levnavrozov.com. My e-mail is
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