THE LONG VIEW
Andrew Graham-Yooll on a hit literary year that included Mikhail Bulgakov and Death and the Maiden
When the Berlin Wall came down, Russia,the most powerful member of the federation that replaced the Soviet Union, became a field for fortune hunters and new millionaires. So why not authors’ rights and royalties? Into the Index office one Spring morning marched Vitaly Shentalinsky of the Moscow Writers’ Union. He unloaded a bag full of goodies on the desk of director and publisher Philip Spender: the writings had been held in the bowels of the Union, deposited there in an act of bureaucratic self-preservation by KGB agents who had seized them from their prisoners. We could only marvel at the names listed for we could not read Russian. Irena Maryniak, our Eastern Europe editor, was called in and after a glance expressed her delight, ‘How can we have them?’ she asked. Shentalinsky wanted money; we did not have the funds. I asked if I could check the copy with Irena, most of it printed in editions of Ogonyok magazine. She sat by our unreliable photocopier. I prayed that this time it would not fail. I copied as fast as I could, threw the copies on Irena’s desk and returned to Spender’s office with the magazines.
The result was a jumbo edition for August/September 1991. The cover read ‘USSR: the hidden literary treasure of the Lubianka’. It included the diary of Mikhail Bulgakov, the interrogation of Osip Mandelstam, an unknown novel by Andrei Platonov, Isaac Babel’s case file and an interview with Vitaly Shentalinsky. He deserved the credit for gaining access to the archives. I felt very proud.
Shentalinsky had spent months campaigning for access to the Lubianka. When writers were arrested their archive usually disappeared with them. Shentalinsky estimated that at least 2,000 writers had been imprisoned. Hundreds vanished and around 1,500 died. Their manuscripts were the most important evidence that survived. The first success came in 1989 when access was granted to Isaac Babel’s case file. ‘As a society we are still shell-shocked from the Lubianka terror,’ Shentalinsky told Irena Maryniak. ‘Now they’re inviting us to get up and dance, and people won’t. It’ll take two generations to resolve. If you give a slave his freedom he’ll treat it as yet another arbitrary act. He’ll snatch at what was repressed within himself and make slaves of those around him.’
We were savouring our success when the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman called to ask me if we would publish his new play Scars on the Moon (Luna que se quiebra). The title came from a romantic all-time favourite bolero by Mexican composer Agustín Lara. The play was a chilling account of a Chilean woman encountering the man who had tortured her during the Pinochet regime. I told Ariel Dorfman we had a budget of one hundred pounds and that was it. He said he had expected a bit more, but relented.
Dorfman had returned to live in Chile from the US the previous year. In an interview published alongside the play, he told me: ‘Basically, there will always be a co-existence in many societies between those who committed crimes and those who were repressed. This co-existence is a fact of contemporary society. It does not happen only in the Chilean transition to democracy, which in its own way is very Chilean. It happens in all transitions – in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. We call the situation created la impunidad – the state of impunity. We have to understand what we have done to ourselves, and that somehow we can stop.
‘The point about the play is that it works in the grey zone of ambiguity. It allows each person in the audience, or each reader, to ask themselves who they are in relationto each character. In Chile, everybody has lived that situation. How do you make the truth, how do you pervert one truth to bring out another?’
Within weeks, the title of the play had changed to Death and the Maiden and opened at the Royal Court Upstairs, thanks in many ways to Harold Pinter. In October 1991, Nick Hern published the Royal Court edition. Then came Roman Polanski’s film. The play had outgrown us. That was as it should be.
Andrew Graham-Yooll was editor of Index from 1989 to 1993. His latest essay in English is Who do you Think you Are? in the Index-Seagull manifesto series. His most recent book is a bilingual anthology of Argentine poets, published in Buenos Aires.
