My Dinner With Vassily and Tatyana : Two Russian Emigre Writers Talk About Shopping, Sex, Literature and Politics in America and Their Homeland

“WELCOME!” RUSSIAN novelist and playwright Vassily Aksyonov tells me as he swings open the door to his Washington townhouse. Tatyana Tolstaya, the short-story writer, has already arrived and the two friends are reminiscing about old times and new in the ex-U.S.S.R.

“So much has happened in the past year,” Tolstaya exclaims. “It’s hard to keep up.”

Aksyonov’s living room is brightly decorated with artworks and Russian posters advertising his plays. His wife, Maya, has prepared a huge meal; the main course is a spicy Uzbek-style lamb dish. In accordance with Russian literary tradition, the menu also includes several bottles of wine and Moldovan cognac.

The host, expelled from the Soviet Union a decade ago for what he calls “the crime of writing,” has just finished his first week of jury duty and he wants to talk about it. Aksyonov has been an American citizen for two years now and is fascinated, he says, by the way the U.S. justice system works--that guilt and innocence are decided by ordinary people and not by the government. It’s a subject that’s been on his mind for some time.

“To those of us who come from Eastern Europe,” he wrote in his 1985 memoirs, “In Search of Melancholy Baby,” “American democracy at first seems as fragile, as vulnerable, as Little Red Riding Hood in the forest. Accustomed as we are to the brute lawlessness of our former governments, we tend to look upon democracy as weak. . . . But gradually we come to see that the coexistence of a number of views is what makes America strong, that its strength depends to a large extent on the flexibility of its parts.”

Aksyonov, 60, became interested in Western popular culture when he was a medical student in Leningrad, where he listened to jazz on Voice of America. After his first novel, “The Colleagues,” was published in 1960, he quickly established a reputation as one of Russia’s most outspoken anti-Soviet writers, eventually leading Communist Party authorities to strip him of his citizenship in 1981. He came to the United States two years later, and is now a professor of Russian literature at George Mason University in Virginia. “Emigrating is something like going to your own funeral,” he says. “The only difference being that after your funeral your nervous system calms down.”

His guest, Tolstaya, 41, appeared on the Soviet literary scene in 1983, and in 1988 her short-story collection, “On the Golden Porch,” was published. Not long afterward, she came to America, joining the faculty at the University of Texas. Her latest collection of stories, “Sleepwalker in a Fog,” was published this year. Next February, she will teach Russian literature at Princeton. Tolstaya knows her university issues.

“The modern ideas that prevail on American college campuses are ideas we had in totalitarian countries in the 1920s and ‘30s,” she says. “Political correctness and feminism, women’s studies and all those things. It’s absolutely a copy of ideas connected with the class struggle and class literature of the 1920s.”

But differences between the two cultures run deeper than similarities--for instance, the spiritual element of the Russian psyche. “Russian writers and thinkers have often called ‘the Russian soul’ female,” Tolstaya has noted, “con trasting it to the rational, well-defined soul of the Western man. Russians don’t want logic. The most important thing, to them, is emotion, dreams and enigma.”

Separated for decades by the Cold War, Americans and Russians have a lot to learn about one another. If seeing ourselves as others see us is a useful experience, seeing ourselves as Aksyonov and Tolstaya do is like looking at the results of a cross-cultural Rorschach test.

The day before our get-together, defense lawyers had rejected Aksyonov as a juror in a highly publicized trial of a man accused in a drive-by murder, and that seemed like a good place to begin our conversation.

Aksyonov: It would have been hard for me to be impartial in that case, because I’m really indignant about what’s going on. Here were exactly the same kind of gangsters who did such horrible things in Los Angeles. Exactly the same. This guy was driving around with his buddies and said, “I feel like killing somebody.” He felt like killing somebody. And that’s what he did. Amazing.

Tolstaya: I know how you feel, Vasha. But what happened in Los Angeles was the result of a class problem. When blacks are killing blacks and Mexicans are killing Koreans, is that racism? Or is it economics? As I watched the Los Angeles riots, I thought about what happened in 1917 in our country. There were two different classes in Russia before the revolution, rich and poor.

Aksyonov: Come on, that’s just an artistic metaphor. In the United States, there’s not stratification just on the basis of financial status, everything in America is complicated by racial tension.

Tolstaya: Well, you’ve been here longer than I have and know more about this, but it seems to me there’s a parallel to what went on in pre-revolutionary Russia. That’s the point I wanted to make. Serfs weren’t a different race from other Russians, but they were perceived that way. After the serfs were freed, the intelligentsia felt guilty and they tried to help them by building schools and hospitals. They created a form of welfare.

Aksyonov: Some people sacrificed everything they had for the poor.

Tolstaya: Yes, but the former serfs hated those who helped them and tried to destroy what they were doing. A lot of Russian literature at the end of the 19th Century speaks about that, how the poor rejected help because they thought they were being deceived again by the upper classes.

Aksyonov: There are many blacks in America who feel that way today.

Tolstaya: Let me tell you another thing. Those gangs that were looting in Los Angeles, bring them to power and you would have the Soviet Union all over again. It’s a dangerous situation.

Aksyonov: The attitude toward blacks was very strange under the Communists. A black man couldn’t be brave or cowardly, couldn’t be honest or mean. He could only be oppressed. In certain circles in the United States you hear the same thing: If you’re black, you must be oppressed.

Tolstaya: From what I can see, many blacks have accepted that idea, and they push back others who disagree with them.

Aksyonov: You’re right, and I’ll give you an example. Recently, we had a black professor lecturing at our university on Malcolm X. I went to hear him, and the reaction to his talk was amazing. Black students seized on everything he said that justified their anger. Then one student asked the professor how he managed to get the FBI material he cited on Malcolm X’s case. “Well,” he said, “nothing could be easier. I just applied for it.” The students all seemed very disappointed. They believe that the so-called white power structure is automatically against them. The black community had a great leader in Martin Luther King. He was a real Tolstoy. Now there are militant groups who are trying to replace King with Malcolm. To many young blacks, Malcolm X is an idol, an icon, the only man who can lead them to the future. But Malcolm X, I would say, is a very ambiguous personality.

Tolstaya: Doesn’t that remind you of Russia?

Aksyonov: It does. But the problem for Russians now isn’t merely choosing new leaders. It’s overcoming the lack of creativity that was imposed on them by a totalitarian regime for 74 years. Russians have an orphanage mentality. Communism made everybody feel like children under the protection of Big Brother. Party officials promised to give us everything we needed to survive: a minimum amount of food.

Tolstaya: And they did.

Aksyonov: A minimum amount of clothing.

Tolstaya: And they did.

Aksyonov: Isn’t that welfare?

Tolstaya: The whole country was on welfare.

Aksyonov: No wonder what’s going on now is so painful.

The novelist lights a cigarette, Chesterfield unfiltered. The smoke curls up from under his drooping mustache as he gathers his thoughts. Aksyonov puffs words out in great bursts of energy, then bats them around with hand gestures that sweep the air. The conversation continues.

Tolstaya: At this stage there are no painless solutions. What they are trying to do is change the society from a welfare state to a free enterprise system. What do they call it?

Aksyonov: Shock therapy.

Tolstaya: Right. A few people are cured and the rest end up in the cuckoo’s nest. How much will really change in Russia? I don’t know. For women? Well, I don’t think the relationship between men and women will be different. There was never a gender problem in the Soviet Union, not the way there is in America.

Aksyonov: But, Tanya, Soviet feminism was only used for propaganda purposes. In the 1930s, we had women ship captains. There were women army colonels. Women flew planes. They used to say that Soviet women were the most liberated women in the world. And I guess it was true. In the real world, though, Russian women were treated horribly. Most of them were just plain exhausted from overwork.

Tolstaya: Unlike American women, women in Russia were pushed and pulled by the government toward liberation, and in theory they were liberated. Of course, many of them didn’t want to be. Exhausted is the right word. Work was hard and they were all underpaid. But at least Russian women had a choice, even if all choices were painful. They could have a career or stay at home.

Some women might think that being a housewife is horrible. I never found it to be true. Before I became a writer, I had a job at a publisher’s. I went in twice a week, drank tea, chatted with people and did my proofreading work at home in the evenings. All day long I cooked and played with my kids. It wasn’t bad. I even liked standing in line for food. I always took a good book with me and the time passed quickly. American women say they don’t want to stay home. They want careers. But a career in the United States isn’t the same. You move around and meet people, do interesting things. Careers for Russian women in that sense don’t exist.

Aksyonov: That’s fine. But Russian women these days want to make real money. Look how many young girls in Moscow are becoming prostitutes. Hard-currency prostitutes. Even ruble prostitutes. Maybe this is proof that the ruble is getting stronger. It’s partly due to economics and partly due to living in an extremely puritanical society. In the 1950s and ‘60s, girls in Soviet high schools and universities knew nothing about sex.

Tolstaya: Once, after she shook hands with a boy, my cousin thought she was pregnant. She was so afraid. She didn’t know how to tell her mother. That’s how bad it was. There was complete ignorance.

Aksyonov: Then, all of sudden, women found themselves in a brave new world.

Tolstaya: Sex. Money. Drinking. Dancing. Meeting Westerners. It’s all exciting. And if you don’t have high standards, it can be profitable. In Russia, prostitution is now regarded as an economic opportunity. The whole society promotes it.

Aksyonov: Everyone’s money crazy.

Tolstaya: Exactly what the Communists predicted.

Aksyonov: The Communists. Russians always blame their problems on the previous regime--whatever the previous regime was. There are people I know who still blame their troubles on the Tatar invasion, and that was 700 years ago. . . . And don’t forget the Americans.

Tolstaya, a member of Russia’s most famous literary family (her grandfather was the novelist Alexei Tolstoy and the renowned author Count Leo Tolstoy was a distant relative), talks about recent events in her country as if they were taking place on another planet.

Tolstaya: I never believed all the propaganda about America. I was born in 1951 and don’t remember the Cold War, but I do remember the way we felt about the United States. After Stalin died (in 1953) and all his sins were revealed, a certain cynicism started growing in Soviet society. Whatever was said by the government was taken to mean the exact opposite. So when we were told how lucky we were to live in this wonderful communist country and how great our leaders were, no one believed it. And since anti-American propaganda was always included in these official pronouncements, no one believed that either.

Aksyonov: As a result, it’s now impossible to say anything negative about the United States. Russians can’t imagine there are actually homeless and jobless people in America. They hear about the poverty-stricken areas of Los Angeles where some poor family has a car, a fridge, a VCR, food stamps, and they say, “Oh, my God, food stamps! To buy lobsters! What I wouldn’t give for some of those.” This isn’t poverty. It’s Disneyland.

Tolstaya: It’s hard to explain anything about America to a Russian who has never been here. At the receiving end there’s too much distortion. They don’t accept anything you say, particularly when you talk about problems. Being poor in the United States is the dream of every Russian. Actually, things are so bad in Russia I’ll bet there are some people who wouldn’t mind living in an American prison.

Aksyonov: You and I grew up in different generations, Tanya. I saw the Cold War in full swing, when everything American was considered evil. An innocent beverage like Coca-Cola was thought to be a wicked ideological drug. No one knew about Pepsi way back then.

Tolstaya: I remember that. In 1958, my parents went on a world cruise and my father brought back a little bottle of Coke. We kept it for a long time. Here was this forbidden drink right in our own home. Eventually we couldn’t resist any longer and we all tried it. There was such a feeling of danger. That didn’t come from my parents. It came from the society, which said that drinking Coke was wrong. Can you imagine?

Aksyonov: Remember the warnings? There were three things that American imperialism provided for poisoning the socialist working masses: Coke. What else?

Tolstaya: Chewing gum.

Aksyonov: And jazz.

Tolstaya: Oh, what a horrible influence that was. Exposure to anything that was made in America was supposed to make you stupid.

Aksyonov: Jazz was officially forbidden. But we would listen to it just the same. I used to hear Willis Conover playing Louis Armstrong and all the jazz greats on Voice of America. It seemed like a miracle at the time--this wonderful music coming from the United States. We would do anything to hear jazz. We even concocted recordings on hospital X-ray plates. That really made us feel like sophisticates. In Leningrad, there were a lot of so-called smart alecks, who knew everything that was popular in America, the music, the clothes, all those things. Moscow was livelier, but these guys in Leningrad, which was called “the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution,” were very well informed.

Tolstaya: I miss that, the way we talked to each other and discussed things. It’s not the same in America. There’s no adventure.

Aksyonov: It’s hard to compare. Russia is going through the most dramatic period in its history. I’m reminded of Stendahl’s expression: “Unlucky are those who didn’t live during the revolution.” There’s a revolution in Russia now. In America life is stable. Whether that makes it easier to be a writer here is another question. Then again, it’s easier to be a writer if you have a professor’s position.

Tolstaya: But that means you have to teach literature, and that can be rather depressing. Some departments only want you to teach theory. They don’t expect the students to read books--not to read books! The most fashionable theory these days is deconstruction, which says that the writer doesn’t exist.

Aksyonov: That’s such rubbish.

Tolstaya: I know. But that’s what’s popular. The writer has nothing to do with the text. Can you believe it? Where do they think it comes from?

Aksyonov: That’s only impotent scholarship. It reminds me of the kind of Marxist crap we used to be fed all the time. . . . What I’m struck by is the sheer number of writers there are in this country. In Russia, there were 10,000 writers in the Writer’s Union. But here there are even more. Maybe 100,000. Every week there’s some new literary celebrity I’ve never heard of before. I pick up the New York Times Book Review and see new names all the time. Who are these guys?

When Russians drink to their health, it’s always bottoms up, and when Aksyonov starts pouring the Moldovan cognac, all of us confess we haven’t felt this good in a long time.

Aksyonov: Who was it who said, “A writer is a second government?”

Tolstaya: A Russian?

Aksyonov: Yes. I think it was Solzhenitsyn. When the Communists were in charge, writers were the only source of unofficial information, so they were a kind of government. I was kicked out of the country for being a writer. I got the news while I was visiting Los Angeles. It took a while for the shock to set in. But when it did, I was pissed. To be told you can never go back to your homeland! I was really in a state of anger. I didn’t know what to do. Then I got a job offer from USC and the decision of where to stay was made for me. I’m grateful to this country. It gave me shelter at a very crucial moment in my life. It’s hard to forget.

Tolstaya: Russian writers have a very long history of survival.

Aksyonov: I have many friends back in Russia. And they’ve been surviving just fine, doing what they’ve always done: writing, discussing ideas, drinking wine, having fights, having fun. I have to tell you, though, every time I return, it’s like stepping out of a time machine. I feel like such an outsider.

A simple question in the store--like “How much is that?”--causes the most amazing stares. Maybe it’s the way I talk after living in America, or my body language, but the reaction is really weird. “Who wants to know?” the clerk says.

Tolstaya: You have been away too long. That’s normal. In Russia the customer is always wrong. Everything that happens to Russian consumers reinforces a sense of guilt, especially in food markets. It’s very frustrating.

Aksyonov: Ah, but in Moscow, if you find a nice cucumber, it’s like striking it rich.

Tolstaya: When Russians eat something good, it makes them happy. That’s why we express a great deal of tenderness toward food.

Aksyonov: Look at the food commercials on American television. People take a bite out of something and all of a sudden they’re so shocked. “Ummm . This is good! Honey, I love this stuff!” What did they expect it to taste like, a piece of garbage?

Tolstaya: I don’t know a lot about how Americans eat, but I have noticed that when someone invites you to a cocktail party you always get the same thing: white wine, dips and these little triangular sandwiches. Is it food or Post-Impressionist art? You can’t enjoy it. At least I can’t. And the talk! Everyone feels obliged to show how much fun he’s having, that his life is wonderful, his career is wonderful. You know it’s not true, so why pretend?

Aksyonov: Russians would rather complain.

Tolstaya: Don’t you think that’s more fruitful? Really, it’s the best way to start a discussion. You begin by complaining and you turn that into a conversation.

Aksyonov: Suppose I say, “Hi, How are you?” and you say, “Fine,” the conversation is over. But when you say, “Oh, I’m not very good,” that opens the door to lots of subjects. It also opens the door to lots of annoying people, too. Russians think everybody is fascinated by their problems.

Tolstaya: Maybe this is another manifestation of the Russian soul.

Aksyonov: Everybody thinks their own troubles are interesting. I can tell you from personal experience that Americans have almost no interest in what happens outside the United States. The screening process is quite thorough. Outside ideas and, I’m sorry to say, outside writers have a very hard time penetrating.

Tolstaya: That’s why so much about Russia is absolutely alien. So many things are unknown. And don’t say it’s because the Soviet Union was a closed society. We weren’t closed. The West was closed to us.

Outsiders never tried to penetrate Russia to find out what was going on. One of the strange paradoxes of the Cold War was that we knew more about what was happening in America than Americans knew about us. And as far as I can tell, that’s still true.