Issue #10/65, May 20 - June 3, 1999  

By John Dolan

The Grassy Street by Assar Eppel translated by Joan Turnbull Glas New Russian Writing v.18 1998

Has Russia gone out of fashion in the English-speaking world? I combed the bookstores of Moscow for new English-language books about Russia or translated from Russian, and found next to nothing. The bookstores mentioned delays in importation and other logistical problems, but I suspect there's something else involved: a sullen distaste for Russia following the August Crisis and the Kosovo War.

One of the few publishers still dedicated to making Russian literature accessible to English-speaking readers is glas, a British-funded enterprise whose New Russian Writing Series produces two or three translated novels or story collections per year. Peter Aleshkovsky's novel Skunk, which I reviewed in the last eXile, was published by glas. I wish I could claim that I'm reviewing another glas product in this issue because I get huge kickbacks or a corner on the pulped paperback market--but regrettably, they haven't offered me a kopek. Or even a bleedin' farthing. They simply happen to be the only house which still puts an effort into publishing non-canonical Russian literature in English. For this, glas deserves all the plugs I can give'em.

My only problem with their Russian New Writing Series is that the writing isn't really very new. Their latest offering is The Grassy Street, a series of interrelated stories by Assar Eppel. They're decent work, but not "new" by any standard. They're not the work of a young writer; Eppel was born in 1935. And they're hardly recent productions; Eppel finished this collection by 1980.

One must ask: is Grassy Street the best and freshest Russian literature glas could find? Aren't there any good thirty-year-old novelists in Moscow these days? In choosing which writers to bring to the English-speaking reader, glas has of course to keep in mind what its editors might see as a moral obligation to give censored authors their belated debut (Eppel remained unpublished, allegedly because of his "unorthodox views," until 1994). A very laudable deed...But what if it can be done only at the expense of genuinely new Russian writers, writers who are pushing Russian literature into new territory? In that case, I'd rather see something fresh than delayed literary justice.

Eppel's stories aren't bad...they're just a little schmaltzy. Dinner-theatre stuff, really. Chekhovian pathos, with some gross slapstick added and a slightly hammy ironic narration--that's the essence of most of them. The first story in Grassy Street, "Red Caviar Sandwiches," is typical, recounting a beautiful woman's tryst with the stunned narrator in the utter filth of a podmoskoi barracks. Judging by a blurb on the back of this book, this simple juxtaposition of grime and rapture sent European critics wild (as it always does). In a back-cover blurb a French critic, Christian Mouze, claims that "Red Caviar Sandwiches" reveals "...the genius and the miracle of Asar Eppel: to impose life in the midst of social disaster and the ruin of the self."

Aaaaaah shaddup, Chrissie. "Red Caviar Sandwiches" is not by anything even close to a miracle; it's nothing like genius; it's just a competent, not particularly original love-amid-the-ruins story, compounded of pedantry, titillation and victim-pathos; and it's been done a thousand times before.

Some cultures will fall for the same tricks over and over. French critics hyperventilate every time they encounter a plot which mixes sexual-awakening softporn with some handily vague historical/intellectual backdrop. The vagueness is important because it allows them to paste on their favorite phrases, like "the ruin of the self," like christmas ornaments. Eppel, intentionally or not, plays to this sort of audience in nearly every story. For example, in case the slower critics don't get the Stalinist background adumbrating "Red Caviar Sandwiches," Eppel says about ten or eleven times that his beautiful lover's husband is an NKVD officer, allowing the reader to infer that there's something much more than slum sex going on in this story. Which, when you get down to it, there isn't.

--Aah, they make me tired, these endlessly gulled and gullible critics! Don't they ever want to read anything new? Don't they realize that the reason they like stories like "Red Caviar Sandwiches" is that all its elements have already been made and polished by generations of earlier writers? Think I'm being harsh, do you? All right, then: here's a sample of this alleged literary "miracle":

"This was a meeting between two people who, for different reasons, dearly needed each other. A woman, who needed me, and I, who needed this woman most in the world. A meeting without shame, or rather, outside shame, celebrating with muffled sobs our triumph over the foul surround and over the hero of these out-of-the-way places, [her husband] the spook...."

How will we ever hear anything new if we keep praising simple collages like this? "Stalinism was bad; sex is good." That's new, baby. That's daring. A fucken miracle.

In truth, "Red Caviar Sandwiches" isn't a bad story. It's the critics whoset it up for a big fall by lazy, timorous overpraise for the familiar. The fact is that most critics (like most academics, plumbers and NKVD officers) don't really want to see anything new. It makes them sweat. They love, and will always overpraise, the generic, the formulaic, the familiar.

It really makes one long for an aestheto-fascist coup, in which critics who use words like "miracle" and "genius" to describe formulaic pathos will be the first to be stood against a wall. "Here comes yer miracle, M. Mouze, critic for La Quinzaine Litteraire: nine grams in the forehead!"

Ah, happy daydreams...but back to business. There's another factor, the ethnic card, which makes mainstream critics slobber over these rather banal stories. When a writer of victim pathos stories is not only a survivor of Stalinism but a Jew as well, Pavlovian critics begin to salivate and pant. Eppel's two paradigms of victimhood, Stalinism and Jewishness, are so familiar, so easily digested by weak stomachs, that the lazy and timid critics can just kick back and hum along.

And Eppel, to his credit, knows this. This is what redeems him in my eyes: because he knows, and admits, that the misery he invokes is already overfamiliar, and makes the staleness of his pathos the topic of his best story, "Semyon's Lonely Soul." Semyon is a classic victim-among-victims, a shy orphan pushed into marriage with a meanhearted bitch from a "highly unattractive family." While his wife makes her monthly (!) visit to the bathhouse, he plays his violin sadly on their porch. When she comes home, she curses him for embarrassing her and expels him from the house. That's the end of the action, but Eppel adds a last paragraph commenting on the banality of the events:

"[Semyon] doesn't know that his orphan's tears, his incorrigible innocence and superfluousness...have already been suspended in space and time, and the banal violinists, phantasmal brides, and Grassy Streets recorded....Our Semyon cries and doesn't realize that the deceased has already been foreseen and foretold by the artist, triumphantly polishing esplanades God knows where."

Eppel is talking about Chagall here--suggesting that it's impossible to make Semyon's elegy because Chagall has already done it in graphic form, and a form as suspect as it is successful, full of schmaltzy "violinists, phantasmal brides and grassy streets."

The self-critical coldness anddistance of this ending give "Semyon's Lonely Soul" a moral and intellectual rigor which raise it well above Eppel's other stories. But there are some other good pieces in The Grassy Street. "Two Tobits" takes some incongruous elements: Old Believers, vitamin deficiency, the Soviet tradition of informing on one's neighbors and the German invasion; and puts them together in a tight, clever plot. "You're My Second" is an honorable representative of that most searing of Russian subgenres, the short story focused on a protagonist so good and kind as to be utterly doomed (eg Tolstoy's "Alyosha the Pot").

Eppel's very limitations are of the sort that most mainstream critics find appealing: above all he is a sentimentalist, and flatters his good characters shamelessly, insisting that the grimy suburbs of Stalin's Moscow abounded in clever, noble souls trampled by the system. (This is especially apparent in the story "Inasmuch and Insofar As.") Maybe it's true; maybe Stalinism produced hordes of lovable buffoons; but that's not what Shalamov said. Why mention Shalamov? Because after reading The Grassy Street, I kept remembering the glacial breath of the Kolyma Stories, their refusal of comfort and their insistence that suffering corrupts, rather ennobles, human beings--comfortable as it may be for French critics to believe otherwise.

In order to justify allocating what are very clearly scarce resources to publication of a far-from-new writer like Eppel, his work really would have to be a "miracle." And it just...isn't. It out-Herods Herod to believe there's nothing fresher out there. Maybe the Gaidar generation decided to go for the gelt and spurned literature. But it's just not plausible that among the many motley survivors of the Night of the Delovie Lyudi, there isn't a single young writer worth publishing. Find her or him--or it, glas guys. Do your job.