Late Soviet Memoirs

Abstract

Late Soviet Memoirs Courtney Doucette Marianna Tax Choldin, Garden of Broken Statues: Exploring Censorship in Russia. 204 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1618115010. $69.00. Ellendea Proffer Teasley, Brodsky among Us: A Memoir. 166 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-1618115782. $48.00. In 1932, the recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate John Scott set off to the Soviet Union in search of work and the opportunity to contribute to something bigger—opportunities he felt were unavailable in the Depression-era United States. Fortified with newly acquired welding skills, he set off to a Soviet Union that, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, defied global economic trends. Scott was welcomed as a foreign specialist and assigned to help build the steel works in Magnitogorsk. He described his contributions to this iconic Soviet project in his memoirs Behind the Urals. Scott's early experiences reflect a kind of optimism with the Soviet project that became unimaginable after the early Soviet period—even by the 1940s when Scott penned his memoir and became increasingly critical of the USSR.1 For others, the relationship to the Soviet Union most often cultivated in the West became increasingly negative after World War II as the Cold War progressed, Warsaw Pact countries invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the details of the 1930s Terror became better known. A recent wave of memoirs by North American specialists cast this point in sharp relief, while poignantly illuminating their engagement of the Soviet project in the 1970s–80s.2 As one might expect, recent Western memoirists [End Page 218] who describe their travels to the Soviet Union during the Cold War went to the USSR not with industrial skills but with or in search of PhDs. They traveled not on work visas but on diplomatic passports or through Intourist and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). These changes are telling of how Soviets and Americans came into contact and the progression of Soviet-American relations during the Cold War. The author of Brodsky among Us, Ellendea Proffer Teasley, was trained as a Bulgakov scholar at Indiana University in the late 1960s. Together with her husband Carl Proffer, she launched Ardis Publishing House in Ann Arbor to publish Russian and Soviet authors in Russian and English. These two figures played an exceptional role in the life, immigration, and work of the Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, by which they heightened awareness of Soviet poetry in the United States during the Cold War. Marianna Tax Choldin, the author of Garden of Broken Statues, began her career as a professor of library administration in 1969 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she became an internationally renowned expert on Russian and Soviet censorship and the founder of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs, which she directed from 1991 to 2002. Russian and East Europeanists might know her best for the annual Summer Research Lab, which she launched in 1973 to welcome scholars from around the world to the outstanding library collections at the University of Illinois for several months each summer. _______ Brodsky among Us is a carefully composed literary portrait of Joseph Brodsky (Iosif Brodskii), who was best known as a Soviet dissident poet exiled to the United States in 1972. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1987 and became the first (and only, to date) Russian to become US Poet Laureate in 1991.3 Carl and Ellendea Proffer met Brodsky through Nadezhda Mandel´stam on their first trip to the Soviet Union in 1969. At the time, he was a notorious (to many) Leningrad poet still living in his parents' room in a communal [End Page 219] apartment. Though he had gained the favor of the Silver Age poet Anna Akhmatova, he had already run afoul of the Soviet government, receiving a five-year sentence to hard labor that was commuted to exile for a year and a half to a farm in the Arkhangel´sk region of northern Russia. Even in their first meetings, Proffer Teasley recognized Brodsky's contradictions. "He talks we are nothing in the face of death," she writes, "but he...