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This episode is brought to you by F's the Beauty Official Podcast Join host Evan Ross Katz on the official podcast for FX's hottest new series, the Beauty, taking you behind the scenes with its amazing stars as they discuss the show's most jaw dropping moments. Featuring Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope, Ashton Kutcher, Rebecca Hall, Bella Hadid, Meghan Trainor, Isabella Rossellini, Jessica Alexander and Ari Grayner. Search FX is the Beauty Wherever you listen to podcasts.
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C
And for delivery welcome to the New Books Network.
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D
Good day. My name is Dr. Charles Petillo. I'm a host on the channel and today we are pleased indeed honored to have with us novelist, historian and general polymath Leslie Chamberlain. Leslie Chamberlain is an acclaimed author of both nonfiction as well as fiction, and today we're discussing her newest book, the Mozarsk Road, published by Austin McCauley. Welcome. Leslie Chamberlain, lovely to be here.
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C
Hello.
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D
Why did you write this book?
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C
Why? So why did I write it's the Mozhaysk Road? Well, I spent some time in Russia when I was quite young. I think I was 26, and I was a Reuters correspondent and I'd just come out of seven years in university reading mostly Russian literature, Russian philosophy. And so I was plunged into the real world of the Soviet Union. And I passionately wanted to make sense of that country. And I could see things about it which I was familiar with from history and from literature. And yet it was a very strict, strange place for an English woman of my age and background. So I suppose I made a lot of mental notes. I didn't make physical notes at the time, but I wanted to make sense of that country. And it's taken me a very long time, I would say about 40 years. It sounds ridiculous. I mean, obviously I haven't been working on it all the time, but it's a very, very difficult country to understand, as we know from the present day. And I wanted. I wanted to feel at least partly positive about it. The way I'd felt about Russian literature and about Russian philosophy. I knew there was something very good there, but there's also some very bad things going on in history. I tend to feel that Russian people are trapped in a certain kind of history. They can't get out of it. And I wanted to give them my. My sympathy by creating characters who were, you know, not just Westerners, not just people like me who were spectators, but actual Russians. And in a way, two broad kinds of Russians. One was, I think, an obvious subject. That is the dissidents, a very brave, very tiny minority of people who were protesting against the Soviet system. And then a group to which I've given the name Nomplatz. It's an invention of mine in real life, as it were. We used to call them the apparatchiks. They are the people who are running the country. They are, as it were, the administrative class, the middle class that carries out the orders, that perpetuates the system. And I wanted to try to understand them as well. So actually, they're the characters I'm. I'm proudest of. It's a novel that sees these three sets of characters, I.e. western observers, dissidents and nomclatz interact, actually trying to understand each other. Yeah. So that's how I came to write it. And I originally wanted to call it. This is a very long time ago, I wanted to call it of man and Men, a rather portentous title, although I think it would have fitted well enough at the time when I was in Russia, which was 1978-79, it was a time when we in the west and also the Soviet Union, we were competing in definitions of humanity. I think humanity with a capital H. And I really felt that that battle for the idea of humanity was happening in the Soviet Union. And of course, for us Westerners, it seemed a rather grim idea of humanity, because everything that we were used to in terms of social comfort and color and so on was all very repressed. But on the other hand, here was a society that was experimenting with equality. And I think that always has to be compelling for anyone who has any social idealism in them. I mean, how would it be if we could actually carry that ideal through? Well, in a way, if you were cynical in 1978, you say, yes, it's been carried through, and look what the result is. There's nothing in the shops, people are rather miserable and so on. But I didn't Want to give up on it quite as soon as that. So I was very interested in different kinds of dissident voices, those who thought that, you know, the Soviet Union should be abandoned. I think hardly any of them did. I have a character called Alexander Razumovsky and his wife, of whom I'm very fond of both of them. And Alexander Razumovsky is very loosely based on Andrei Sakharov, the best known dissident of the time. And Razumovsky believes that Russia can be reformed. I suppose he's a kind of, kind of Gorbachev character before Gorbachev came on the scene. He believes that Russia essentially got its special way of developing in history and it can be reformed. It didn't have to go down the worst channels, that it did go down in Soviet times. So he's not negative about his country. And one of the things that mattered to me was to find characters who did, who did like Russia as it were, that wished it well. And there's a range of characters over the Westerners and the dissidents who love their country, wish it well and wish it could get out of its difficulties. Whereas I suppose amongst the non Platz, amongst the administrators, they are a very cynical class, a very selfish class of Russians, and they absolutely hate it, but they're in service to it. They're really enslaved to it. They can't get out because those are the professions they've chosen. They've had to sacrifice their independence of thought and their critical powers. And so I'm equally interested in that because I think everybody has to make compromises in their lives. And I was very interested in these Soviet characters who had chosen to make that compromise. And also we know that it was very difficult. It was pretty much a choice of self sacrifice to become a dissident. You were either going to be put in prison, you might be exiled to the east, or you might be chased out of the country. And we do remember people like Solzhenitsyn. I mean, Solzhenitsyn was, I think he was poisoned possibly even twice before they finally decided to drive him out. And the question of Russians going abroad is one that does come up in the novel because they don't want to go. They love their country. And I was very, very interested in that feeling. So there's a young dissident who is Razumovsky's heir presumptive, and his name is Malinsky. And the early pages of the book are really about his decision to take on this burden. And he feels he has no choice he feels he's born to it. And I think we can understand that. People do have feelings like that about their vocation in life. But even Rasoumovsky tells him, you know, are you sure you want to do this? You'll have no life. Wouldn't you like to go abroad? Wouldn't you like to pursue your academic career? Which of course he can't do as a dissident. And I'm interested in what he felt about that and how he abided by his decision to lead the dissident cause. I won't tell you what happens to him, but you can probably imagine why did you.
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D
Or was it the publisher subtitle of the book the Russian Heart of Darkness.
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C
Unquote, yes, Russian Heart of Darkness. No, that's definitely from me. I've had very little intervention from my publisher and it's an obvious indication of what I'm writing about. Something that some darkness in the Russian tradition that just seems impossible to root out. I mean, we all have difficulties, Western countries, eastern countries, any countries, we all have our, our strengths and our difficulties. But for those of us who followed Russia with a great deal of enthusiasm and even love, what's happened since 1991 has been a huge disappointment because we've seen it from our Western point of view at least, slip back into a kind of rather malign darkness, anti Western attitudes, aggression and so on, and repression at home. It's really painful. It's politically intolerable, but it's emotionally very, very painful for anyone who's followed Russia all through their adult life, like me. But the other aspect of the subtitle Russian Heart of Darkness is obviously an allusion to Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. And I'm a great admirer of Joseph Conrad and the way he managed to combine ideas and a great moral awareness in his fiction. And I think Conrad was, and I say he has moral awareness. I think Conrad was also very aware of our human moral weakness. I'm thinking of a novel called Lord Jim in particular, and I am also interested. I'm interested in moral strength, as in dissidents Razumovsky and Malinsky, but I'm also interested in weakness. And so that's why I've given quite a lot of attention to these non plats, these apparatchiks who are leading their lives. And I've even given them the idea that they too want to make Russia better. And they have this idea that they can do. How can they do that? Well, there's this very talented, dynamic young man called Marlinsky and shouldn't we try to win him over to our side? Maybe he could show us how to make Russia a better, kinder place. And they have that thought quite seriously and the action plays out around that. I won't spell out what happens, but. So to come back to your question, Conrad and the interest in moral themes, moral strength, but also in moral weakness, in what can go wrong in pursuing certain ideals.
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D
To what extent, besides Andrei Sakharov, were the characters in the book based on people who you knew at one time or another in. So is Guy Ola blast in the late 1970s?
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C
Well, I would say not really. I mean, I've read one or two reviews of my. Of my book and they inevitably start by equating me with a character called Gels. Maybe she is partly the narrator and partly a character in the third person. I do actually vary the pronoun between the first and the third person. And I think in the case of Gels, yes, she's in a situation similar to the one I was in. And yes, she's my age and I think she has my sense of bewilderment and desire to get closer to something, that heart of darkness to try to understand it. And she ends up by being, I think, rather terrified. There's no catharsis there. But the thing about Gels is I gave her the surname, maybe in a very. And I thought what would be a very obvious way, that is, I don't know that her viewpoint is the right one, as it were. And so she's a possible way of looking at what was happening there and the people around her. But maybe she's wrong and maybe she's not me and maybe she is me. So I keep it rather loose and tentative. And the biggest reason for that is, I think something I felt at the time and something I still feel, is that Russia is a huge subject. Can you get a bigger one, really? And who was I at the age of 26 to take this subject on? And now I'm much older, I still feel the same. So it's kind of have written the novel and I've given everything I can to it. And I hope that I've said something even profound about Russia, but it's too big a subject for me to insist and suggest that I've mastered it. I mean, people have been trying to understand Russia for hundreds of years. So that's the character who may or may not be me. As for the others, I mean, they're not. No, I would say they're not based on people I knew, because, I mean, the Westerners, I knew people like them, but they're not modeled on anyone in particular. And apart from Rasoumowski amongst the dissidents. No, they are inventions of my own mind. And then the nom klatz, the apparatchiks. Well, I didn't know any apparatchiks. We Western journalists, I mean, we knew the dissidents and we were observers of public life, but we weren't invited out to the country residences of privileged apparatchiks. So those characters are very much invented. And again, I pay homage to Joseph Conrad for the kind of impulse to try to understand people whose lives were so morally compromised. I mean, no doubt there were. There is, you know, there will be elements of my life and people I knew who go into those characters, but they're not based on anyone I knew. I invented them. And I think in inventing those characters, and it's a little bit reflected in the names I gave to them, I was influenced by Russian literature. So, for instance, Marlinsky, his name came from a writer in the early 19th century, romantic writer, not terribly well known now, but known to people in the field. He has a friend called Gerasimov. Gerasimov was a 19th century painter. Razumovsky, as you know, was patron of Beethoven. So I took the names from Russian culture because I, in a way, I wanted to put my own writing back into the soil of Russian culture. Rather, I'm thinking of a sort of gardening metaphor here that I'm turning over the soil. I'm digging up the old names of a rich culture, and I'm trying to reinsert them into something that I'm trying to understand in the late 20th century, early now 21st century. So the characters are my invention, but the names I give them are, in a way, a homage to Russian culture.
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D
The novel talks about, particularly the beginning of the novel, the on the being on the horizon, what is referred to as the Second Russian Revolution. Are you referring to Andre Amalric's book Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? Or are you referring to something else? Or I should say the characters are referring to something else?
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C
Yeah. No, not to Amalric. I wanted to write a novel. I mean, after all, I published it in 2025. I wanted to write it. I wanted to frame it in such a way that readers in the 21st century could more easily imagine what I was talking about. If I. As we know, Russia changed dramatically in 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed. A so called free, open, democratic country was created in its wake. And already, I think in the 1970s, we Western journalists, I mean, one of the questions we had to ask ourselves, and in a way a lot of our work was about picking up rumors. So I decided that there was a rumor that everything was going to change, that the system was going to change. And I think that was very plausible because the Soviet Russia we were experiencing was really grinding to a halt. The economy was in terrible shape. People's lives were really difficult. New technology was making dissent much more, much more powerful. I wouldn't say it was easy for a dissident to get the attention of the United States president, but they did it. And so Sakharov and others would write open letters to the American President, who was then Jimmy Carter, and they would write to the Pope and they would get their message out. And the more technology evolved, the more they were likely to make their case heard very loudly in the West. And that then put political pressure on the Soviet Union. So there was a sense, I think, that this country might fall apart any moment. And I, I suppose I slightly enhanced that feeling. I maximized the rumor in order to test really what all the characters across the spectrum would feel about that. What would they feel about the Soviet Union ending tomorrow? So the Western journalists, I think, are as caught as anyone else. They don't know what they're going to feel about that. And amongst the wariest people are the dissidents. Because if there is a great upheaval, if there is a renewal of the country, will it be along the lines that they are hoping for, or will it be something different? Will it be some kind of trick? I know Russians today think that 1991 was just some kind of trick. I don't quite see it that way, but myself, but certainly it has been a disappointment. And who knows what scheming there was right from the beginning to set things back again into a more Soviet kind of way for Russia to face the 21st century. I think that's what we've seen happen. So if there was this rumor going around that Soviet Russia was about to come to an end, everything was going to change. The people who worry most, and I think we can imagine this from our own lives, the people who worry most are the apparatchiks, because they are the People who are propping it up. They are the people who have the jobs in that old world. And if it vanishes tomorrow, what are they going to do? So there's a little bit at the very end of the novel about what they do do. And I. Well, I tell it in a different mood. I think it's like a coda to a tragic story, a coda which is somewhat absurd when someone has, after all, committed at least moral crimes about other people in regard to other people. Not necessarily crimes that are in the statute book, but moral crimes that that person should become an IT manager or a gardener or a hotelier or. It's terribly banal, that fate of those apparatchiks caught up in the change from one Russia to another. And perhaps I can pick that word out, banal there, because to refer back to Joseph Conrad and moral preoccupations and a worry on my own part, I think, to try to sort out what I feel about moral weakness, of which I'm as capable as anyone else, and moral strength, which I admire, but perhaps I admire somewhat from a distance. It seems to me an ideal that's not always approachable. So what I thought I was describing in the lives of the apparatchiks was what Hannah Arendt, in a different context, the philosopher Hannah Arendt called banal evil. And it's that evil which is totally at home and caught up in everyday practices such that we don't notice it, such that it seems sort of okay. And as everyone will remember, Hannah Arendt was describing Nazi Germany and how ordinary people could get caught up in that horror, how they could condone the persecution of the Jews, how they could accept what was happening with Hitler. And so I've taken that term and I've reapplied it to those apparatchiks. And so part of my novel is about the banal evil that they're caught up in. And it asks the question, you know, how did they get into this situation? Well, that's easy. There's no alternative if you were born in the Soviet Union, unless you become a dissident or unless you try to get abroad, which, of course, Jews could do in the late Soviet Union, but other people couldn't. So it's a question of then. Of say, how did they get caught up in that banal evil? And how could they get out of it? How could any of us get out of it if we were in that situation? So in this regard, I hope I've shown some kind of sympathy for those apparatchiks who were Weak people, certainly not attractive people. But what alternative did they have? And how would it be if we were in that situation? Would we, you know, we wouldn't all choose to be dissidents. We wouldn't have the courage to destroy our lives. So that's a very important theme for me.
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D
Would it be true to say that your characters, in particular, your Russian characters, overindulge in what was known at the time as, quote, kitchen speech, unquote? Can you tell the audience what is meant by that delightful phrase?
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C
Did you say kitchen speech?
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D
Yes.
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C
It's not an expression. I know. Can you, can you elaborate?
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D
Basically, it's a tendency towards long winded semi lectures in the kitchen, because that was a place where, if you no longer live in a communal apartment would be the safest place to have a private conversation about politics, such as it was at the time.
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C
Right? Well, yes. I mean, this goes a long. A long way back, doesn't it? I mean, I think in a. In an earlier draft of this novel, I had an epigraph from the 19th century critic Visarion Belinsky. And I always like this quote because it says, you want to go off and have supper, but we haven't yet solved the question of God. And that was a tribute on my part to a cultural tradition which is in a way obsessively serious about sorting out how to live. And of course, there is a very great tension in Russian culture between this obsession with how to live, how to live a good life and what actually comes to pass in that country, which for most of us stops most people living a good life. And I don't only mean a good life in the sense that it's come to. Come to rest in the west. And we mean a certain amount of material comfort and affluence and so on. I mean a good moral life. And you couldn't lead a good moral life in that country because you didn't have freedom of expression. And so the energy that might actually go into living a good life tended to get channeled, I think, into talking about it, into imagining how it could be led and drawing on all sorts of cultural resources and then wanting them to share them with other people. So I think it was not only making political and philosophical speeches to each other in places where they couldn't be overheard. And that was quite difficult because there was a lot of electronic bugging in those days. I mean, we journalists, we used to go for a walk in the park if we wanted to talk to Russians because we couldn't be overheard there. We could Be pretty sure we weren't overheard. But of course, this was also a time when Russian poetry was tremendously strong because that was a way of expressing your ideals and your disappointments. And given the intellectual level of the censorship, you could get most messages passed with just a little bit of sophistication. And so there's quite a lot of poetry in my novel which is taken, excuse me, taken from poems that were written at the time. I mean, they're not poems that are written by me. They're written by really good poets in Soviet times. And also by Pushkin, the great 19th century poet, early 19th century poet, who was always a touchstone for a. A decent Russia without being too moralistic. I mean, Pushkin was a unique figure, but he is a touchstone for the dissidents, I think, and following them, the Westerners also understand him as a touchstone. And at the beginning of the novel there is a dissident rally and it takes part in. It takes place in Pushkin Square in the center of Moscow. And that has a cultural and moral significance. They're drawing on the strength of Pushkin to help them get through the difficulties of life in the later 20th century. And as you say, they're doing a lot of talking about it, but they're also writing the most wonderful poetry and painting wonderful paintings, symbolic paintings. And I've included quite a few descriptions of symbolic paintings in the novel to let the reader feel that there is this huge culture that's trying to express itself and that has to hide. That has to find different ways of speaking and looking. And the paintings, I mean, I could obviously only describe them in words, but I do have a blog in which I've pictured some of the inspiration for those paintings. I've included paintings by actual painters and also by a fictitious painter called Mundt. And I allude also to a famous. This was actually a real occasion in the Soviet Union. I think it happened in 1975, which is a little bit before the time of my novel. But the painters of the country were forbidden from showing their work in galleries. The dissident painters, let's say. But they found a loophole in the Constitution. They were forbidden from showing them indoors in galleries, but nothing said that they weren't allowed to show them in the open air. So they pioneered, very, very brave artists, pioneered an open air exhibition of their work. And I suppose this must have been in summer, in late summer. And all the Western reporters went, went there and bought some paintings. So they're important. There are two American reporters in my novel and they're wealthy and they buy some of these paintings and put them on display in their flat and they support the dissidents in that way which I find very attractive. In reality, that open air art show was bulldozed by the Soviet authorities. Somebody, one of the apparatchiks, said, oh, we can't have that. We're going to send in a bulldozer. And one of the, again, this is a real event, which is perhaps the only one I've really borrowed, a real event. One of the artists of that exhibition caught hold of the bulldozers, the tray in front of the bulldozer, the. And was lifted into the air by the bulldozer. And I think there's a photograph of it. It was a most extraordinary occasion and news of it went around the world. And of course it was a huge embarrassment to the Soviet authorities. Everybody could see that they were crude and brutal. They smashed up these paintings, they spiked an artist on a bulldozer and carried him up into the air. I mean, he wasn't hurt. But these were terrible goings on. And so I have incorporated that event in my novel. And my chief apparatchik, my chief nomclat, whose name is Vladimir Korsakov, he's embarrassed too. I mean, he's a man of at least greater sophistication than that. He has good paintings on his wall and he actually would like to see a better Russia, but he just can't work out how to do it. And in the end, he's the one who gets the idea of trying to persuade the dissident Marlinsky to come over his side to make a better Russian. I'm afraid that Marlinsky doesn't believe him, doesn't believe that that's the right road to go down. So Korsakoff is stuck. But of course, one thing the apparatchiks don't do is make these long moral speeches you asked me about, because they're not morally ambitious and that's a distinguishing feature. So whatever you think of these long hectoring speeches about the good life and how to achieve it, it's surely better to be preoccupied in that way than not care at all, like the apparatchiks.
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D
Was it true to say at the time that there was this, use the old expression Chinese wall of separating the apparatuki from people who had referred to themselves or perhaps as intelligentsia, people who had intelligentsia values. Would you, Would you say if at the time, and that was something which was very much true, that people became involved in the dissident movement Simply by virtue of the fact that they were adhering to what they regard as intelligentsia values.
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C
Oh, that's a. That's a difficult one. I mean, in a way, I think that's essential to my plot, because why else would this leading apparatchik, Vladimir Kosakov, whose early posting abroad was in Paris, a city he loved, whose culture he loved, and he has a wife who's a very cultivated woman who speaks many languages and translates from French and English. I pay tribute to her, by the way, in the novel by giving her some translations when she's laid very low by events in the end. So I would say that this couple are the Korsakoffs, the leading apparatchiks. They're the ones who've got the most power, but they're also the ones who are most European leaning and the most intelligent and the most cultivated. And so, insofar as they are those things at all, they would like a different Russia. Of course they would. And it's Korsakoff who invites Malinsky out to stay with him in his country dacha. It's more than a dacha, it's a huge villa. But he invites him out into the country to stay with him and to mingle with his apparatchik colleagues. And they try to persuade him that it would be a good idea to join them rather than oppose them. That together, perhaps they could realize some of the ideals of the dissidents. But I'm afraid what Marlinsky finds is that these people, even though they're flirting with the ideas of the progressive ideas of the intelligentsia, they have really no idea of the values that lie behind them. And so I don't know if you're trying to impress a Russian dissident. Are you going to do that with a display of wealth, with a display of opulence? He's not made to be impressed by those things. And I don't want to give the whole story away, but that weekend that he spends with the apparatchiks, I think is a very interesting one for. For anyone who's ever thought about Russia. They're very different groups, the apparatchiks and the intelligentsia. Even though there's communication between them, Kraft.
- [36:26]
D
Mac and Cheese is better than 90s hip hop. We'll remind you of your childhood without making you feel incredibly old. Kraft Mac and Cheese. Best thing ever. Was there any symbolism? I'm sure there was. I won't be more explicit in terms of what I'm referring to. Was there any symbolism in Korsakov's ending in terms of the position he occupied at the end of the novel.
- [36:53]
C
Korsakov. Yes, yes. Well, he was the owner of this very splendid villa in the.
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D
With his wife. Sorry, through his wife.
- [37:05]
C
Through his wife, yes. So his wife is a really interesting character because her father was a distinguished art historian. And I think I got the inspiration for him by realizing in Soviet history that there were some exceptions, there were some people whose exceptional gifts were recognized and they weren't persecuted and they were given special favors, and otherwise they weren't touched by politics. They were allowed to be outside that treacherous realm. And her father was one such person, and he was such a distinguished art historian, known both at home and abroad, a fictional person, of course, that he was much decorated in the Soviet Union. And he was given. He was given a property in the country, a country house that had historical value, and he restored it. And in fact, this building, this villa, was built by Italian architects in the early 19th century in Russia. And that's historical fact that if you were rich enough in the early 19th century, you would get an Italian architect to come and build you a nice neoclassical villa. So the Korsakovs, as a couple, inherit this lovely villa. And the villa, in a way, represents. Symbolizes European values in Russia. It's something good, but they can't make it work for the whole country. And what happens is that the Korsakoff uses it as a base for his ideological allies to meet. And so it becomes a very second or third rate place culturally and intellectually, because they're all. I don't know if this is an American word, but in English we say they're all toadies, they're all enslaved to the system. They're all saying the right thing at the right time. There's no originality there. And yet they think of themselves as highly cultivated people. So they strike up conversations about art with a capital A, and poetry with a capital P, and literature with a capital L. And they talk about how much they love Italy and how much they love German literature. And in a way, it's all the most terribly fake because it connects with nothing inside themselves and nothing in their country. It has no roots. And so this is, on my part, this is a portrait of an aspect of Russia that's always been so disappointing, that it's Western, but it's so superficially Western that it's a travesty, it's comic. But it's also, in a way, tragic for the country that a lot of what is imported from Europe is imported in terms of not the depths of art and the quality of art and the humanity behind art. But it's imported as a kind of fashion, as an accessory to being rich, to being powerful and so on. You can still see it now, of course, but this is the situation out there in the country. And it's very naive of this couple to think that they're going to win over a dissident of Marlinsky's quality. He's going to win that. They're going to win him over to their side, because he's not. I mean, he has a good weekend. It's an interesting weekend for him. He didn't know that people like that existed in places like that, that existed. But he's not going to. He's not going to join his life to that.
- [40:51]
D
Would it be true to say that the book carries a bit of nostalgia for Moscow life 50 plus years ago?
- [40:57]
C
Well, that's an interesting question. It certainly was. I mean, one of the great attractions of the Soviet Union, of Moscow was that it was completely different from anywhere in the West. And so I think the temptation for Westerners was either to be rather sarcastic and critical and carping. So I have to say I had American colleagues at the time who would describe the Soviet Union as a Third world country with nukes. This isn't a kind way of seeing it. But there were other Westerners there who were very sympathetic, I think, to the difficulties that this country had got into. And also the, I can say this, the moral ambition that lay behind the original impulse for the Soviet Union. I'm not attributing this moral impulse to Lenin, but I'm attributing it to all the philosophical input that led up to it. So the 19th century and the idea that they would build an. An equal society and a rational society and a progressive society that would. That was peace loving and that would bring peace to the world. Now, those weren't only cliches, there was truth behind them rooted in the Russian 19th century tradition. And so whenever signs of that tradition became visible in the 1970s, I think one felt touched by it, genuinely touched and not at all condescending, because what kind of condition was the west in for us to be condescending? We were materially affluent, but we weren't moral paradigms. And we had difficulties in our societies that in a way the Russians didn't have because they'd created this classless world. So it was possible every now and again to see something positive in that experiment, something touching. And I don't know whether I've rendered It as somehow nostalgic. I hope I've given it that coloring that I've just been talking about to you, that it was something that would take you by surprise and remind you that there were somewhere there were true ideals in this world that had got lost, that had become travesty, that had become. That had become comic, that had become horrific, but there were some true ideals there. And also, I think, because Soviet Russia was cut off from the West. I mean, I talked earlier about communications getting better. I mean, technological communications getting better and giving the country more. The dissidents more possibility of expressing themselves. But the country itself, the country at large, was cut off. I mean, they only had the Soviet media, and they didn't know what the west was like, except as it was portrayed through those media. And inevitably, the west was caricatured, was made to see America was portrayed as sort of politically menacing. It was portrayed to Russian people as Americans. American media portrayed Russia to their people. So that it was a very negative and rather ridiculous picture. So I feel. I did feel some. I suppose nostalgia is not the right word, but I wanted to evoke that kind of atmosphere in which there was a great deal of ignorance about the other side. And it would lead to rumors and it would lead to caricatures, and it would lead to, you know, a false picture of the other side. And in a way it was quaint, and in a way it was sad. I have a scene you might think as nostalgic. It's set in a bookshop on Gorky street in the center of Moscow. And it's about a bookshop, really, that has almost no books in it. And in order to buy a book, you have to buy a token. And then with the token, you have to go to another assistant behind the counter and get the book. And she will produce the book from a shelf that's out of sight, because most books are prescribed, most books are forbidden. And I described the scene in that bookshop one morning when a rumor has gone around Moscow, in this case a true one, that a certain book has come in which contains an essay by Razumovsky, and everybody wants to read it. And the huge queue grows outside the bookshop, and the bookshop opens, and they come in, and of course they have to queue again for their token and queue again to pay for the book. And the bookshop manager should probably have got worried a bit sooner seeing this huge queue. She should have realized that something was amiss from her point of view, because her job is to sell books or not sell books. To people, because her shop is full of boring political speeches that people don't want. So maybe they just come in out of the rain or whatever. But on this particular occasion, there is this vitally interesting book by this real writer, Razumovsky, and the person who really upsets everything is my character, Gels Mabie, who happens to come along and see this huge queue. And it's true that we, as journalists, if we saw a queue, we would always join it, because we want to know what's happening, what is it people are suddenly being offered that's out of the ordinary. And in this case, it wasn't tomatoes or pineapples or something, it was a book, it was a publication. So that was right up my street as a young journalist. So I portray myself as joining the queue and going into the bookshop and trying to talk to people, and they don't want to talk to me because I'm a foreigner. And eventually the bookshop manager, a nice, ambitious, but a very nice young woman from the provinces, realizes what's going on and has to clear the bookshop. And it's especially bad because as a foreigner, that is me in the shop, and everyone really runs away. And I am trying to talk to them about the book, and I'm trying to say, what is it? Why did you want to read this book? Why is it so important? And no one will talk to me. And so that scene, which is a fictional scene, by the way, it didn't actually happen, it does invoke in my mind nostalgia for that world where a Westerner with good intentions was trying to communicate with people, with ordinary people, and find out what they wanted and understand that their nominal culture, nominally like ours, a world with bookshops and concerts and galleries and so on, was completely repressed, completely strapped down. So the bookshop has no books, and the music scene is also repressed. If you think about what happened to Shostakovich and other composers, they could only compose in a certain way. And the artistic scene, I've already described the bulldozer attack on the dissident art show. So I'm still, I think, nostalgic. But nostalgic is a positive thing. I don't mean that I still remember that travesty of a world which in the West I. A world of museums and paintings and music and books which I cherished. And I came to this world where it was completely travestied, and I was interested in describing that for all time.
- [49:00]
D
Really one of the more charming aspects of life in Silversky, blast the fact that if you came across people from intelligentsia backgrounds, that they would behave, talk and behave as if Garrettson or Belinsky or Chernyshevsky were still alive and breathing.
- [49:18]
C
Yes, I mean, to the extent that I can know that. I mean, obviously I'd read these Russian writers, cherished them in my time at university and after. And I've gone on cherishing them. I mean, I wrote a book, a whole book about Russian thought about 20 years ago, and I called it. What I wanted to call it was Motherland, Otherland. That is, I wanted to explain how Russia is a motherland to itself and an other land to countries outside it, like the United States and like Britain. My publisher on that occasion didn't allow me to have that title. So it's a book called Motherland, but it's devoted to people like Chernyshevsky, Bielinsky and so on who were trying to map out a good Russia in the early 19th century. I mean, they were a young country, like America was a young country. I think they've always felt that affinity and they were trying to give it a philosophical structure. And I admired that. As an admirer of philosophy, I'm not a pragmatic, empirical Brit. I'm an admirer of rationalism and his and ideas. I think that's a good foundation for a good society. So I was very interested in that. Whether that spirit is carried over into the novel. Yes, I think it is. And one way of signaling that for me was again to use these 19th century names. I mean, not the ones you've mentioned. No one in the novel's called Chernyshevsky or Belinsky, but others, they've got this, this 19th century background. And I think that's very strong in Marlinsky and in the way he talks, which is a slightly formal way of talking about an uninhibited, unconstrained way of using words like freedom. I mean, I know there's a strong political element now which is also in our own days, which is unconstrained in its use of those words. But unfortunately, the words themselves don't carry the same meaning, I think, anymore as they did for 19th century Russians who truly, truly believed in them and saw them as a social ideal for a progressive, good country. And my characters, the dissidents, are still definitely in that mode at all.
- [51:47]
D
How would you compare Thomas Guy, Blast of a mid to late 1970s, as covered in your novel, with the Putin's Russia of today?
- [51:59]
C
Well, I've had some comments from Russian readers, Russian readers living in America, who see it as directly relevant. And they think that many of the observations of the Upper Archiks and the way and what happens to the dissidents in my story, in my novel, reflect directly on what's happening now in Putin's Russia and what's been happening, indeed, for the last 20 years. I didn't set out to write it with that conscious parallel in mind, but I think it says a great deal for Russian history that it's happened that way. And I think I began this, I began our conversation by saying that.
- [52:57]
D
I.
- [52:57]
C
Wanted to sympathize with all Russians, and I certainly wanted to sympathize with a feeling that the Russian situation is such that it's terribly difficult to escape, that these old historical preoccupations just keep coming back. And one of those preoccupations, of course, is a vicious competitiveness with the west and a desperate desire to be superior and to flaunt that superiority. And at the same time, we know from Russian history that Russia has really struggled to be equal to the West. It hasn't had the culture, it hasn't had the, the economic efficiency. It doesn't have the historical cultural rootedness that the west has had and has been busy throwing away, of course, in the last half century. But Russia was always, I think, viciously jealous of the West. And if it had a chance to make the west look foolish, if it had a chance to say, ah, no, but, you know, now we're, we're the winners, now we're the superior ones, then it would always take that opportunity. And we can see that in Putin just really in the last goodness, you know, in the last weeks, any, any opportunity to make the west look foolish, to, to enhance the glory of some, some greater Russia. He will take that opportunity. And I'm afraid that was always there in the Soviet Union. But of course, by the time I went there in 1978, the Soviet Union was in such a dire condition economically, politically, socially, that it was quite hard to boast about it. I mean, they did still boast, of course, because that was written into the Soviet mentality, into the ideology. So now they don't have the Soviet ideology, but they certainly have this mentality of Russian superiority, of denigrating the west, of looking down at the West. The west is. Well, as Dostoevsky said in the mid19th century, the west is already a cultural graveyard. Well, it wasn't, but I do remember the President of the United States quite recently talking about Europe as a cultural graveyard. And I'm afraid it reminded me of not of Dostoevsky. I don't think I will equate the President of the United States with the great writer Dostoevsky, but with some of Dostoevsky's worst political outpourings. There was a. As everyone knows, there was a rather dark side to Dostoevsky politically and in some other aspects of his personality. But, no, I do think that there are strong parallels with the present day, but I think that's a very sad fact about Russia.
- [56:05]
D
If you wanted people to take one thing away from your book, what would it be?
- [56:09]
C
My sympathy for everyone, every kind of Russian involved in this difficulty of getting out of that Russian past, of shedding some of the worst aspects of. Of the Russian past and freeing the culture up to be the really strong and amazing culture that we know it can be. I mean, after all, when Russian literature came on the Western scene towards the end of the 19th century, it bowled everyone over. It was so superior to what we had in Britain. I mean, I'm not saying that we didn't have Shakespeare and so on, but what we had in the 19th century just did not have that. That humane range and depth that Russian literature could bring. And then, of course, we had Russian art, the Russian experiment in modernism, the fantastic painting that has affected all of us, and sculpture and architecture, and to an extent, the Soviet. Soviet repressions put a cap on all that. But we saw that this country had enormous cultural power. Fantastic. And in 1991, in the 90s, we were reminded, I was certainly reminded of that again by the huge number of very gifted musicians, artists, writers who reappeared on the Russian scene. And of course, inevitably, most of them came to the west where they could earn their living. And perhaps they would feel now that it was just as well they did come to the West. But Russia is this huge cultural power, this huge source of emotional wealth and cultural wealth and intellectual uniqueness, really. It's originality and it needs a chance to flourish, and it keeps being flattened. At the same time as, I think, ordinary Russians, why shouldn't they also have a chance to lead comfortable lives? They shouldn't be dragooned into not having access to free media. They shouldn't be made to be afraid of speaking their minds. But all these things have come back in our time. And so I want to reiterate my sympathy with all classes of Russians, even those who are somehow caught up in the bad politics. Because as I see it through my book, it's quite difficult to escape. Of course, in the era since 1991, yes, they could escape. So I'm not sympathetic to those people. But as of the time I set my novel in Russia, I'm deeply sympathetic to Russians, really, across the board, and I'm particularly sympathetic to Russian culture. I want it to be given its freedom. I want it to be allowed to flourish, because this is rather ironic, because Russia wants to be supreme politically and keeps telling us that. But it could so easily be supreme culturally if politicians didn't keep repressing it. So it's along those lines I'd like people to think about my novel.
- [59:25]
D
Certainly my observation, which I would like to agree with entirely. I would like to thank you very much, Leslie Chambler, for being so kind to speak with us today. This is Charles Petillo. Leslie Chamberlain, thank you again very, very much for speaking to us.
- [59:37]
C
Thank you so much, Charles. I've enjoyed.