Georgii Vladimov: bremia rytsarstva by Svetlana Shnitman-MakMillin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Georgii Vladimov: bremia rytsarstvaby Svetlana Shnitman-MakMillin Geoffrey Hosking Shnitman-MakMillin, Svetlana. Georgii Vladimov: bremia rytsarstva. Izdatel´stvo AST, Moscow, 2022. 702 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. ₽1495.00. T hisis a very unusual book, simultaneously a work of literary history, literary criticism and biography. It also has elements of autobiography, since as a child Svetlana Shnitman lived in Murmansk, the setting for Vladimov's 1969 novel, Tri minuty molchaniia( Three Minutes' Silence). Her vivid childhood memories offer an illuminating background to the text. She did not know about Vladimov then, of course, but much later in her life got to know him in her capacity as a literary scholar. After his wife Natasha died in 1997, Vladimov, by now a lonely widower, visited her and her husband Arnold in London and talked at great length. She taped some of those conversations and uses them as source material in her book. The result is a work not only of considerable insight, but also of impressive and moving personal engagement. Vladimov believed that 'literature can and should have an effect on the reality around us; the text does not exist in isolation but comes alive thanks to the passion of its creator'. His heroes are usually searchers who experience a crisis and learn something important from it. For that purpose he presents social reality in maximum detail and reflects the way it impinges on his characters. He took this technique so seriously that, in order to write Tri minuty molchaniia, he spent three months as a crew member with a trawler in the Arctic Ocean, thus fulfilling the recommended Soviet literary practice of tvorcheskaia komandirovka. Shnitman's study is remarkable for its insight into Vladimov's personality. His 'knighthood', highlighted in the title, took shape as a strict code of honour. It originated in an incident of his teenage years, during the time he was a cadet at the Suvorov military school. When Zoshchenko and Akhmatova were expelled from the Writers' Union in 1946, he, together with two colleagues, one male, [End Page 163]the other Vladimov's hoped-for girlfriend Vika, decided to visit Zoshchenko to testify to him how much he was admired and revered by his readers. In the event, Zoshchenko was in a traumatized state at the time, was disconcerted by the visit, and eased them out as soon as he decently could. Their visit became known to the school's authorities, and the two boys were summoned to explain themselves. When it was suggested to them that they had perhaps paid the visit beforethe publication of the expulsion order, hence had not been violating party discipline, they seized on the offered exoneration and agreed that that was the case. Later Vika passed him in the corridor and uttered the single word triapka(coward). Vladimov felt so humiliated and ashamed that he resolved never again to commit an act of cowardice or dishonour even under the threat of death. This iron determination to uphold a strict moral code led Vladimov sometimes to misunderstand or overestimate other people, and contributed to the greatest tragedy of his life, as Shnitman shows. In 1983 he emigrated. He was under pressure from the KGB, but, more positively, he had been invited to become the editor of the émigré literary-cultural journal, Grani. He aspired to make it the leading Russian émigré journal on the model of Novyi mirunder Tvardovskii, whom he greatly admired. He realized that Graniwas attached to an émigré political party, the anti-Soviet NTS (National Labour Union), but then that was no less true of Novyi mir. In practice, though, he found that the NTS was not content to leave him full literary freedom. They tried to force him in a Russian chauvinist direction. If he had known more about the NTS he would have anticipated trouble. Shnitman delves into its history and finds that it had a semi-fascist past, and that it claimed, exaggeratedly, to have an extensive network of agents in the USSR. Finally in June 1986 Vladimov was abruptly dismissed from Grani. At that stage he discovered that the NTS had concluded no proper contract with...