Stories are porous (so are we)

Walking composition

"I will not forget where 
I come from. I 
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved 
near and our chanting 
will be dancing. I 
will not be played. I 
will not lend my name 
nor my rhythm to your 
beat."
—from "What I Will," Suheir Hammad

There’s a story my father’s told me that I’ve referred to many times, in essays, in my book, in tweets when I had a Twitter account, in conversation, in my mind. It wasn’t even a story, really. More of a line. A moment or an image, of him and his parents and his two older siblings sitting around their dining table in Leningrad in the 1960s, reading loose-leaf pages of Solzhenitsyn and passing each page on as they finished it.

Almost exactly twenty years ago, my older sister and I interviewed our father while we were visiting him in Moscow, and he told that story again. Or told the moment. The line. I’ve been trying to listen to some of those old tapes for parts to share here (my tape recorder is giving out, so the sound’s been wonky), and when that section was playing a few days ago, there was an undertone I had only vaguely remembered: how important literature was to ordinary Soviet citizens during those times. Essays, novels, short stories, poetry—the way my father describes it, whether it was his parents or him and his teenage friends, people couldn’t get enough.

This 10-minute recording is taken from hours of interviews done over several days in 2003. The excerpts I quoted here are from this recording. The shrill sound about 30 seconds in is the phone ringing. Apologies for that.

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-10:35

“Starting in early 60s, we started reading all underground literature that wasn’t published at all. It was just typed on typewriter and given from one to another. At that time started reading Solzhenitsyn’s novel, and we would get into loose leaves, like this folder, and we would go in our family around the table—we had a big dining room table, so we were sitting around this table and we would have this book, like Cancer Ward, for one night, and we would sit around the table and give each other leaf. After one read, we would give to next person, and we would go around the circle and read the whole novel in an evening. And that happens to a lot of underground literature. I loved a lot of Soviet literature, too. But I read, I read everything, so much stuff.”

Do you think literature was a big part of Soviet society? I asked him. I remember sitting there on the couch in his old apartment in the Frunzenskaya district, my sister trying not to fall sleep, the horrendous, shrill drill of his apartment phone interrupting us.

“Oh, during Soviet times specifically, but I think overall, I cannot vouch for whole population because I worked as a metal worker when I was going to the unique school, and workers in my—”

How old were you?

“Fifteen. I was fifteen, I went to work as a metal worker. There was a pretty substantial class of people, a layer of people, that were very much into literature. You know, if you’d go by tram or bus, like 80 percent of people were reading book. And some of them were reading detective stories, simple things, but most of them were reading literature. So to a degree it’s a pretty vast difference from what I saw in the United States. . . .

We had to stay the whole night in line to get subscription to like 18 volumes of Dostoevsky. Some books—when finally Pasternak volume was printed, you would have to go through hell to get the book, because it’s a very limited edition, and you would have to go through friends of friends, etc., pay tremendous amount of money, and etc. to get a book of Pasternak’s poetry. Same with Marina Tsvetaeva, small, small volume finally came out. . . . Chekhov, you would get a volume of Chekhov, and you would have to put a special effort to get the subscription for like 15 volumes of Chekhov’s. Same with just about any classic writer.”

Do you think—was it more important to people because it was Soviet times?

“It had something to do with it. It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something. But I don’t know. It’s a big, big discussion.”

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The original epigraph I chose for my book on walking was a poem in the Coleman Barks version of Rumi, the one that goes:

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”