sunday
0
magazine
inside:
page four-
sokolov's book
page five-ooking back
Number 5
Editor: Stephen Hersh
Associate Editors: Ann Marie Lipinski, Elaine Fletcher
October 10, 1976
Novelist
flees
Moscow
and
the
KGB
you?" attached - catapulted 31-
year-old Sokolov to the front line
of Soviet litterateurs.
Masha Litvinov-Slonim; the emi-
grated granddaughter of Stalin's
Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxim
Litvinov, was the first to read the
manuscript through.
"We'd ask her 'What's it like?',,
says Proffer. "She'd say 'I can't
tell you.' Then we'd ask,. 'Well,
what's the plot?' She'd say, 'It
doesn't have a plot. It's different.
I can't seem to get away from
"We were in a quandry," Prof-
fer explains. "Who was this au-
thor? Where did he live? Did he
give his permission to have this
published?"
While Ardis wondered how to
reach the author (it was only
through sheer luck that they later
discovered someone had saved the
outside wrapper with the return
address), Sokolov was having prob-
lems of an entirely different na-
ture in Moscow. $
Sokolov had already fallen from
grace' with the Soviet authorities:
his engagement\ to an Austrian
BILINSKY teacher had been opposed by the
government, and had received a considerable
amount of attention from the international press,
as well as the less welcome attention of the KGB.
"They followed me - every hour, every min-
ute - with their walkie-talkies," recalls Sokolov.
"They spent their nights in the car. If I wanted
to go somewhere and took a taxi, they followed
me. Or a taxi would be waiting for me with a
driver from the KGB."
QOKOLOV, A LITHE, olive-skinned man with
black, 'shingled hair and startlingly green
eyes, becomes animated when he speaks o'f KGB
harrassment. He is more reticent when discuss-
ing Johanna Steindl, the language teacher who is
his wife, although Moscow doesn't recognize the
marriage.
It is the circumstances of their first meeting
which Sokolov is asked about most frequently.
He cannot provide the details, for fear of en-
dangering others involved in the meeting. "Every-
one asks us about that," says Sokolov, and the
hesitates. "With us nothing could happen, but
there are still people in the Soviet Union ..."
His voice trails off.
Sokolov, however, is willing to recount an
official version of that encounter: the couple met
in a hallway at Moscow University. "She bought
some books, I came up to her and asked her
what she bought," he says.
Trouble from the KGB followed inevitably. So-
kolov was arrested three times, once under fradu-
lent murder charges apparently fabricated for
the occasion.
At about 2 a.m., Sokolov and Steindl were
talking in the flat they shared. Their conversa-
tion, he says, was interrupted' by the sound of
breaking bottles.
"Then I saw two fellows leaving the entrance
hall of our house. They were running. The next
morning we saw that there was some blood on
the staircase."
After Steindl left for work in the morning,
five KGB agents came for Sokolov. He refused
to open the door.
"They pounded and pounded," he says. "They
threatened to break the door down."
Agents quizzed Sokolov for five hours at a
local militia station. His address book and keys
were confiscated, and his flat was rifled.
His friends were phoned and told to avoid
him, "but not. very insistently," Sokolov admits.
Steindl, meanwhile, had quietly mailed So-
kolov's finished manuscript from the Soviet Un-
ion.
Sokolov had written the book during his two
years as a game warden in the woods border-
ing the Volga River.
Intermittently, he had held a variety of job
at factories and railway stations after foregoing
a career in journalism.
"I wrote for them, I wrote for
the leaders," explains Sokolov.
"But then I stopped it, decided not
to be a Soviet journalist because
I felt I didn't want to be a liar
anymore."
"If you are a Soviet journalist,
you are a priori a liar. If you
want to be an honest person, to
respect yourself, you have to leave
all unions, all staffs connected with
Soviet power.
"You can be a writer - a free :
writer - only if you are not pub-
lished."
In short, you can be a "samiz-
dat," the Russian writers who dis-
tribute carbon copies of their man-
uscripts through the mail. The cus-
tom ig legal but hazardous. (Cop-
ies can not be xeroxed, according
to Proffer, since there is a guard
stationed at each machine.)
rprHE SOVIET GOVERNMENT
was unaware of Sokolov's
book. Had they known it was at
Ardis, Sokolov would have had one
more strike against him: accord-
ing to an act signed by Lenin,
the government has a monopoly on all works
produced by Soviet authors.
The nature of Sokolov's work would have made
it even more unaccetable. Any purely personal
work - such as School for Fools - risks being
branded "anti-Soviet."
'Every ten poems or so you have to write
one on, say, the death of Lenin or a World War
II Soviet victory," says Proffer. "If you don't
make that curtsy every so often, you're not
acceptable."
Sokolov contends that the main design of his
book is apolitical. However being non-political is,
Doily Photo by ALAN
By CYNTHIA HILL
qrHE NEWEST ADDITION to Ann Arbor's grow-
ing community of Russian emigres is an
erstwhile lumberjack, coal stoker, game warden
and Moscow journalist.
Alexander "Sasha" Sokolov is also, accord-
ing to critical opinion, the most important novelist
to emerge from the Sovie Union in a decade.
His,>competition within the U.S.S.R. isn't stiff:
Communist Party standards of socialist realism
make artistic innovation difficult. According to
Slavic Languages and Literature Prof. Carl Prof-
fer, "Experimentalism is regarded as a kind of
western disease." So the fact that Sokolov's first
book, School for Fools, has been likened to the
works of James Joyce makes it nothing short of
revolutionary.
The "discovery" of Sokolov by the Ardis Pub-
lishers of Ann Arbor was as haphazara 9s it was
fortunate.
By the fall of '74, a backlog of unr.gad manu-
scripts was gathering dust on the shelves of Ardis,
one of the very few Russian publishing houses
outside the Soviet Union, and possibly the most
prestigious.
Typically, several were anonymous works, shov-
ed into the hands of tourists and postmarked from
Egypt, Paris, or wherever they had been smug-
gled. Many, according to Proffer, who heads Ardis,
were "bad imitations of stuff that had been writ-
ten 40 years ago." .
But one - an almost unreadable carbon from
Vienna with the cryptic note "Does this interest
Cindy Hill, a former Daily editor, is an occa-
sional contributor to the Sunday Magazine.
Daily Photo by ALAN BILINSKY
by implication, political in the Soviet Union. Fur-
thermore, the author admits that his book can be
interpreted as a model of the communist world.
Penalties for being anti-Soviet are not always
lenient. And in light of the governmental resist-
ance Sokolov and Steindl were already encounter-
ing due to their personal relationship, Steindl
took no small risk in mailing the manuscript.
"She's a brave woman," admits Sokolov.
Sokolov and Steindl applied to get married soon
after they met, but again they locked horns with
the law. Soviet regulations require that, in the
case of marriage to a foreigner, Sokolov's pa-
rents must be aware of his intentions.
While a spate of telegrams insured that they
were aware, they did not approve. Sokolov's fa-
ther, Vsevolod Sokolov, was a retired two-star
general in the GRU (Soviet military intelligence)
with nationalistic tendencies that bordered on
xenophobia.
"I behaved as a dissident," Sokolov says.
"They were surprised and afraid that my be-
havior would -come down on them."
"My father made an official statement that
I was crazy, that I had to be arrested and sent
to a madhouse."
Sokolov responded by accusing his father of
spying on the United States and Canada while
serving in Ottawa's Soviet embassy from 1942-1948.
He refused to submit to a voluntary mental ex
amination.
Despite these obstacles, a wedding date was
scheduled for June 4, 1975 - a month before
Steindl's exchange program contract would expire.
See NOVELIST, Page t
Daily Photo by CHA RIS INA SCHNEILR
Fom Russia with love
By STEPHEN HERSH
IN THE BASEMENT of a private
home, a Russian man sits hunched
over the Cyrillic keyboard of an auto-
mated type-setting machine, hammer-
ing out the pages of the first edition of
a Soviet novel illicit in the U.S.S.R.
The type-setting machine is an IBM,
the latest in Western technology. Very
few practitioners of "samizdat," or, do-
it-yourself publishing, are lucky enough
to have that kind of equipment.
But then, this isn't your average sa-
mizdat set-up. For one thing, it's located
in Ann Arbor.
The Ardis publishing company - the
main clearing house in America for
Russian literature, both in the original
and in translation - works out of the
sprawling residence of University pro-
fessor Carl Proffer. What Proffer, his
wife Ellendea and the four other mem-
bers of the Ardis staff do is make shiny
new editions out of rare books and vir-
gin manuscripts smuggled out of the
Soviet Union.
"We're regarded as the highest form
of samizdat - we literally do it our-
selves," Proffer boasts, while casting a
cursory glance over the work going on
his basement.
The level of activity is subdued. An
IBM machine rumbles and clicks under
the hands of Lev Lifshitz, a member of
Ardis and an emigre from Leningrad
who was the editor of a journal there.
The sounds of books tumbling out of
cardboard boxes floats out of the mail
room. Some posters decorate the walls:
one hyping Ardis with the proclamation,
"Russian literature is better than sex;"
the other a red, black and white blow
up of the cover of a Russian novel by the
writer Lev Kopelev.
Although tide atmosphere of the pub-
lishing house is decidedly low-key, the
output is staggering. "Altogether," notes
Proffer, "what we nublish is 70 per cent
of the Russian literat'ire market in the
rn,,ntr in Finc lih ''
- Ardis stands as the leader in this
country.
And it's not easy to be in the van-
guard of Soviet literature publication
when you're half way across the globe
from the U.S.S.R.
The most delicate problem is getting
copies of the works of literature, and, if
they're secured in the Soviet Union,
bringing them across the border. The
material Ardis prints is generally ma-
terial which the Soviet authorities hope
will never see the light of day.
So the works are either unpublished
or hard to come by in the U.S.S.R. The
Proffers have had to know the right
people to get hold of the literature dur-
ing their visits to the Soviet Union. Now
that Ardis is well-known among Rus-
sian writers, manuscripts come to them
regularly by mail to their Ann Arbor
address. But to get copies of certain
works, they have had to bring them here
themselves - illicitly.
"I guess all the books we've reprinted
were smuggled out," Proffer admitted,
s'inpressing a grin. "By law, you can
take books out if you take them to a
certain place - usually, one of the main
libraries in the Soviet Union - and get
them stamped. First of all, they have
to check them to make sure they're not
on the list of .endangered species. And
you have to pay a 100 per cent tax.
For some of the books we've done, that
alone could have kept up from doing
them, because they were too expensive
to pay the tax."
To look at Proffer, you'd never be able
to guess that he's been an international
smegler. Affable and soft-spoken, sur-
ro'inded by the dozens of book-laden
shelves in his plush study, he's quite
;qIt from the most rigorous tasks
associated with getting Soviet litetature
nhlshed in the United States. On leave
this semester from the University's
sian at the University campus at Dear-
born, and at Wayne State University.
Both she and her husband were profess-
ors at Indiana University before moving
to Michigan.
While chewing the butt end of an un-
lit Cuesta Rey cigar, Mr. Proffer ex-
plained that published books are prob-
ably the least dangerous literary
item to smuggle - or "remove" - from
the Soviet Union.
"We've never either taken anything in
or out that we thought was really dan-
gerous, like a Solzhenitsyn manuscript,
or something obviously political. For tak-
ing things out, our general rule has been
not to do anything, because we figure
that's when you're most likely to get
stomped on. That happened to my life
when she went alone to the Soviet Union
in May.
"She decided she was going to be
brave, and not fool around with all the
other things you have to do to get a
manuscript out of the Soviet Union, so
she just had a suitcase full."
The Soviet customs officials opened
up that suitcase - and their eyes bug-
ged out.
"When they found the manuscripts,"
Ellendea recalls, "it was just like the
movies. They gave me an interrogation
to try to find out who I got the stuff
from. They kept trying to trip me up.
But I figured out pretty fast that they
didn't know anything. I just kept lying
and saying naive things like, 'Well, what
are you supposed to do if you want to
take things out?"'
Surprisingly, the customs authorities
confiscated only half of the manuscripts.
They never learned the story of how
she and her husband get their hands on
the literary material.
The story is a complicated one, involv-
ing a large number of contacts made
over a number of years.
"The real beginning," recalls Proffer,
"was when we met the widow of the
-in plain
thing led to another. Each person would
introduce us to comebody else. In the
first two years, we didn't have any idea
the publishing thing was ever -going to
happen. Meeting these people was just
a matter of interest, since both of us
were in Russian literature. It was fun
for us."
But after getting into publishing, it
became a matter of business. And they
met even more writers.
"I think we got to know almost every-
body in literature there," he said. "Pub-
lishers attract this. Here, everybody's
got a book. In the Soviet Union every-
body's got a book, too. After a while it
was very simple because everybody had
something they wanted from us, basic-
ally.
Now that Ardis is famous among
Russian literary circles, the Proffers
don't have to secure all their manu-
scripts personally by going to the So-
viet Union. Writers are able to get their
manuscripts mailed out of the U.S.S.R.,
and some of the manuscripts end up at
Ardis. In fact, they arrive in the mail
every week - most of them bad, and
more than can be published.
"They can't send the stuff through the
open mail," Proffer said, "because all
the open mail is opened, literally. And
it's illegal to send a manuscript abroad
for publication. So they have to find
other ways than the regular mail. There
are lots of possibilities. Tourists are one.
Correspondents are another. And there
the diplomats who can mail out through
their embassies in closed pouches. But
that's all very hard to arrange. It de-
pends on who you know, and there's a
lot of difficulty connected with it.
"The thing is, it's against the law for
embassy personnel to send out things
which belong to anybody other than
themselves. If an American exchange
student goes to them and gives them
something they're not sunnosed to send
bro wn paper
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