Joint Volume Is Poetic Justice for Soviets, Americans

It was a cocktail party chat with British spy novelist John Le Carre, of all people, and in Moscow, of all places, that led to the imminent publication of an unusual joint venture: publication of a book in English and Russian that showcases prominent and not-so-prominent writers and poets from the Soviet Union and the United States.

The idea for a joint volume was hatched by a group of Philadelphia Quakers who had met with Soviet representatives in Washington to look for ways to help improve U.S.-Soviet relations. With funding from a Quaker philanthropist, they had found a Soviet publisher but had not found a publisher for the American edition.

The project had bounced around for at least two years, but it was only when Tatyana Kudriavtseva, Russian translator of John Updike, William Styron and Arthur Hailey, pitched it to Le Carre in Moscow that Le Carre put the sponsors in touch with Robert Gottlieb, editor of the New Yorker magazine and formerly editor-in-chief of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. Gottlieb referred the sponsors of the project to Ashbel Green, an editor at Knopf, which is scheduled to release the American edition of “The Human Experience” on April 21. The Soviet edition will be out on April 7.

Despite Le Carre’s indirect contribution to the new detente, a Russian edition of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is not likely to be published soon, said Georgi A. Andjaparidze, director of the Khudozhestvennaya Lituratura (Artistic Literature) publishing house, which will publish the Soviet edition of “The Human Experience.”

“I’d rather publish Raymond Chandler,” said Andjaparidze, who spoke to students at Pepperdine University on Monday. “This not the right time for political detective stories.”

Andjaparidze said he will publish 50,000 copies of the Soviet-American anthology in the Soviet Union and he expects them to sell out in no time. Knopf will print 7,500 copies of the American edition.

“They (Knopf) just don’t think it’s going to sell that big, but it’s an interesting book and they’re taking a risk on it,” said Anthony Manousos, a professor at Pepperdine and one of the editors of the book.

The book will include stories by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Garrison Keillor, Alice Walker, John Sayles, Belle Kaufman, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Joyce Johnson, Charles Baxter, Mary Ward Brown and Mary Gordon.

There will also be poetry by Robert Penn Warren, Stanley Kunitz, Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, Henry Taylor, C. K. Williams, Sharon Olds and F. D. Reeve.

The better-known Soviet contributors include poets Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Yevgeni Yevtushenko, and short-story writers Tatyana Tolstaya, Vasily Belov and Bulat Okudjava.

Okudjava, a singer and songwriter whose works were long available only on unauthorized samizdat tapes, contributed a story about a woman returning home after a term in a Stalinist labor camp, a topic not likely to have been touched in the decades before the ascension of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

It was Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, that allowed the publishers and editors of “The Human Experience” to go about their work without outside interference, Andjaparidze said.

“We’re in a very interesting position,” he said. “We decide what to do. So we’ve started to publish the books that weren’t acceptable for many years.”

Among these are the first Soviet editions of Vladimir Nabakov’s early novels, which were written in Russian but banned in the Soviet Union until now, and a one-volume pairing of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” with Eugene Zamyatin’s “We,” a novel with a similarly bleak view of the future. Zamyatin was a writer who fled the Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Soviet-American collaboration is not unique, since a joint volume of memories by Soviet and American World War II veterans is also due to be published this year.

But it will be the first of its kind in fiction, and editors from both sides were proud of having worked together rather than having the American editors choose their American writers and the Soviets choose the Soviets.

“The hardest thing was selecting the poetry,” Manousos said. “I write poetry myself, and I have very passionate convictions about what works and what doesn’t work, and some of the poems they gave us I thought didn’t work at all.

“When I told them that, they were insulted as though I had offended their mothers,” he said. “They couldn’t understand why a poem that was beautiful to them in Russian came across to me as sappy cliches.”