#22 | November 20 - December 3, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

Back in the days when I was an exchange student in New Jersey, I used to spend a lot of time in the basement. The reason was that the father in my host family had built an expensive bar and pool room in the basement and wanted everyone to use it as much as possible. That he had almost no friends who drank seriously or played pool was something that hadn't occurred to him until his $8,000 investment was history. So the family was subject to endless games of compulsory eight-ball.

Foreign journalists don't have pool rooms. What they do have are $80,000 liberal arts educations. And they're herding us into the basement for compulsory lectures every chance they get.

A pool room is a great thing, if you know how to play pool. It's the same with education. If you're a thinker rather than a careerist, exposure to arts and literature at a young age can actually be worth all that money your parents spent on it. But if you don't like to think, you're just stuck with a bad investment-unless you can find other uses for it.

Vanora Bennett of the Los Angeles Times made a valiant effort a few weeks ago to make alternate use of her education. Her piece, entitled "Sobchak Fall from Grace Takes Page From Novels," should actually have been entitled "I Went to College," since that was what the article was really about.

Bennett's article is a literary Evel Knievel act-an attempt to ride a feverish narrative up the ramp of Anatoly Sobchak's career, leap over a chasm of improbabilities, and land safely in a nest of pretentious literary allusions. The distance of the gap should have daunted even the most daring hack, but Bennett plunged ahead, with disastrous results. She starts off with a confident rev of the engines:

"ST. PETERSBURG- The fall of Anatoly Sobchak, a one-time democratic hero, has been as darkly fantastic as any of the classical Russian literature written in this imperial capital that he ran for five post-Soviet years."

So far, so good. But the "literary" angle Bennett stuck in the lead is so obscure that she is forced to dispense with it for the first 500 words of her article, returning to her theme only near the end. The final leap, when she makes it, is a freakish spasm of illogic:

"If anything does make people in St. Petersburg feel a twinge of sympathy for Sobchak, it is the extraordinary circumstances in which he fell ill Oct. 3, an episode in the tradition of the city's 19th century writers Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol.

"Russia's classical literature [why not literary?] heroes are little men-youths pursued through freak floods by nightmarish bronze czars on horseback; or downtrodden bureaucrats dying while their empty overcoats carry on, writing meaningless chits at their desks."

I don't remember Akaky Akakiyevich's overcoat continuing to work after his death, but we'll give Bennett the benefit of the doubt as she struggles to tie all of this to Sobchak. Her incredible summation:

"In Sobchak's case, an ambulance was called to the city prosecutor's office to take him to the hospital only after his wife rushed in to save her husband from what she called 'Communists and Gestapo'."

What? Did we miss something? I may be wrong, but that segue seemed to me to make no sense at all.

After all, only a madman could compare the destitute, balding, dull-witted, socially inept, incorruptible low-level-clerk/simpleton hero of Gogol's "Overcoat" story with the flamboyant, obscenely wealthy, silver-haired, glib, amoral, bloated ex-political boss Anatoly Sobchak. The one thing the two might have in common is hemhorroids, and even there we'd be relying on unnamed sources.

Bennett figures she can get away with this because she knows American readers don't know any better. If she were a Russian reporter, she'd be comparing Huck Finn to Richard Nixon, with smooth-talking Chuck Colson as Nixon's stuttering Jim.

Sovietology is another favorite source of inappropriate hack cliches. Michael Specter of the New York Times came back from vacation recently with a classic effort in absurd journalistic imagery, in a story about the new "drug plague" in Russia:

"For decades," Specter writes, "the kitchen has been the central symbol of this communal society, a place where dozens of neighbors forced to live together would grumble, grab some vodka and try to make it through the night. When the Communists ran Russia, the kitchen dissident was regarded with esteem and his fevered plots gave rise to collective insubordination that most people welcomed.

"But the communal kitchen - and the culture of sharing that it represents - has taken on a sinister new role: It is the center of a new home-brewed drug culture that threatens to decimate the country's youth while fueling a wave of crime that has already put the country's partial democracy at risk." Doubtless Specter in college was forced to write a term paper of some kind about "kitchen dissidents" and has been struggling to build an article around the phenomenon ever since.

Reread Specter's comparison carefully. His sole link between "kitchen dissidents" and the new drug plague is the fact that both dissident insubordination and drug cookery take place in a kitchen.

Most Russian apartments have one or two rooms, plus a kitchen and a bathroom. Given that, we can conclude that about a fourth of all indoor residential activity in Russia takes place in a kitchen. I read, eat, work, and even sometimes do my nails in the kitchen. Drug brewing happens in a kitchen because that's where the stove is. Dissidentism took place in the kitchen because that's where intellectuals bided their time while normal Russians were having sex in the bedrooms.

I don't see too much "culture of sharing" here. Then again, I didn't have the benefit of being educated about Russia in American universities...