The area is rich in museums dedicated to such figures as Pushkin. When one of the foreign embassies, which are also centred here, wanted to build on a small park, the protesters erected a sign indicating that the tree in the centre of it had strong associations with Pushkin, thereby mocking them-selves while preserving the spot. We also stopped at the place where Pushkin was married. My guide called it the Church-of-Jesus-Christ-Going-Up-in-the-Air, which I took to be the Church of the Ascension. It was being restored, but there was some debate as to whether it should be a museum or a living church; there was recent precedent for either, as Gorbachev had returned some old monasteries to the Russian Orthodox Church and caused some of them to be restored as well. Which brings home the fact that there are political currents even in the museum field. Only in the past few months had the state made a museum of the house occupied from 1843 to 1846 by Alexander Hersen, the revolutionary editor who spent most of his exile in England. He has risen from relative obscurity partly because it turns out that he was the first person to employ the word glasnost in the contemporary sense.
However refreshing such communion with the past—and to me it was one of the major pleasures of Moscow, to an extent that quite took me by surprise—my task was to report on the present. And so, over the course of several more days, I set out to make my rounds.
Book publishing was another point of entry. Western writers and readers all know the stories of how the classic Russian writers are revered, and even read, by the true proletariat as well as the allegorical working class, and how contemporary Soviet writers, or those who carry the seal of approval, saw their works gobbled up in editions of many hundreds of thousands of copies; how writers are debated, argued about, and accorded signs of importance such as in North America are only ever given to figures in big business, entertainment, sport, and crime. There is some truth in this supposition, but of course the situation is rather more complicated—as bad as it is good. In any event, the kind of Soviet publishing North Americans were most familiar with, the English-language editions of Soviet and Western writers associated with Progress Books in Toronto or International Publishers in New York—the loving editions of Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, and so on, with their flimsy paper, mundane design, and quaint 1950s hot-lead typography—turned out to be another area, surprise, that was undergoing rapid change. Such was what I learned from a visit to Alexei Faingar, one of the editorial department chiefs at Progress Publishers, the state’s foreign-literature works and, with 1,500 employees, the country’s biggest publishing house. Each year it brought out 600 titles in 50 languages, and another 100 in Russian, in the fields of literature, history, politics, law, and the sciences.
Faingar was a beautifully tailored man in his fifties, polylingual, relaxed, and sophisticated, with the look of a shrewd negotiator and a keen judge of a fluid marketplace. He looked like any European publisher you would expect to find at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We met in the boardroom.
“How are the books selected? Ah, that is a complicated process, but I would say that we rely one-half on our editors here and one-half on out-side specialists living in Moscow. The latter may work in some academical institution, as in, to take an example, the Institute for the United States and Canada. As for ourselves here, I offer as an illustration my own department, which is concerned with essays, works of quality journalism, and so on. We try to use every possible source of such literature, even private sources. We read foreign periodicals, especially the book-review sections; we have a special department for ordering what might be of interest, and we have [hard] currency for the purpose. As a result, we can plan a year’s activities.” When he spoke, in early spring 1990, he was engaged in planning his 1992 releases. On subsequent days I spent some time in the foreign-language bookshop in the same building . Recent releases in English literature included a selected writings of Evelyn Waugh, a lesser novel of Robert Penn Warren’s, and an anthology of journalism with the status of literature that included a long extract from Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. I perceived no common thread with respect to ideology—perhaps those days had already gone—nor with respect to the usefulness of the texts as teaching aids. Taste was the only basis for selection obvious to me.
The typical press run for a work of mass literature was 50,000 copies, a figure that corresponded roughly to Canadian numbers if you allowed for the fact that Canada had less than 10 percent of the Soviet Union’s population. For the blockbusters, as many as half a million copies might be printed, while for specialized or scientific works, the total might be as few as 5,000 copies. Soviet publishers didn’t ordinarily maintain extensive backlists of popular titles, but printed a book hoping to sell it out so they could move on to the next. People shopped for books as they shopped for food, gobbling up whatever was available on that particular day. So at least some small part of what outsiders took to be the average Soviet’s voracious appetite for culture and learning was the buy-now-and-hoard-for-tomorrow-it-will-be-gone mentality. (I keep remembering the sight of a stylishly attired woman on a trolley-bus, opening her expensive Western handbag in search of a five-kopeck ticket to reveal a half dozen of some vegetable—it looked like a cousin of the rutabaga—caked in mud, just as they had come from the farmer’s field. Whenever Soviets saw valuable goods being vended, they joined the queue and bought some, for these goods would soon be worth more than rubles.)
Not all that long ago it was commonly supposed in the West that Soviet publishers of foreign writers were motivated by a desire to show the West in an unfavourable light and would undertake athletic feats of editing to satisfy this ulterior motive. I remember Peter C. Newman showing me the Russian-language edition of The Canadian Establishment; it was a mere fraction of the length of the original, presumably because it retained only the material about Bay Street operators calculated to suggest that they are the norm of Canadian society. More recently, I know, the Soviets had published, without any interference or manipulation, Canadian writers whose unflattering views of the Soviet Union were well known. One house, for example, made a selected poems of Al Purdy available. Which is not to suggest that the Soviets rushed to find a special affinity with Canada, whatever geo-cultural logic there might be in such twinning. “Our geography section has published such writers as Farley Mowat on your northern regions,” said Faingar on eue, “and I read and enjoyed his book on the Second World War [And No Birds Sang], but in the end we didn’t publish it. I confess that Canadian literature is our weak point. We learn not enough of it.” He left the impression that Canadians themselves must take more of the initiative. This led us to discuss the whole question of payments received by authors, a topic in which I have a permanent interest, though one, sadly, that is rather more theoretical than not.
In the past, Soviet publishers would withhold royalties on Russian translations of Western books but permit an author to come in person and collect some or all of the money in his or her account, for spending inside the Soviet Union. In the 1960s many a fur hat and many a case of vodka were bought under pressure of deadline by poor drudges from the West with rubles burning a hole in their pockets. The clerks at the GUM Department Store in Red Square must have seen them coming for miles. But in May 1973, a dozen years before glasnost, the Soviets finally joined the Geneva Copyright Convention and now dutifully send foreign authors their royalties on books published after that date. Payments are made in the foreign currency of the writer’s preference. Some time soon—a few months or a few years? I wasn’t able to pin anyone down—they were expected to become signatories of the Berne Convention as well and then pay up on books predating 1973. Of course, publisher-author relations had always been touchy, with some writers, Americans particularly, refusing to cooperate with the Soviet Union. Tom Wolfe, for example, would not permit Progress to print a large portion of The Right Stuff, though he relented and allowed them to produce his