me the Russian-language edition of The Canadian Establishment; it was a mere fraction of the length of the original, presumably because it retained only the material about Bay Street operators calculated to suggest that they are the norm of Canadian society. More recently, I know, the Soviets had published, without any interference or manipulation, Canadian writers whose unflattering views of the Soviet Union were well known. One house, for example, made a selected poems of Al Purdy available. Which is not to suggest that the Soviets rushed to find a special affinity with Canada, whatever geo-cultural logic there might be in such twinning. “Our geography section has published such writers as Farley Mowat on your northern regions,” said Faingar on eue, “and I read and enjoyed his book on the Second World War [And No Birds Sang], but in the end we didn’t publish it. I confess that Canadian literature is our weak point. We learn not enough of it.” He left the impression that Canadians themselves must take more of the initiative. This led us to discuss the whole question of payments received by authors, a topic in which I have a permanent interest, though one, sadly, that is rather more theoretical than not.
In the past, Soviet publishers would withhold royalties on Russian translations of Western books but permit an author to come in person and collect some or all of the money in his or her account, for spending inside the Soviet Union. In the 1960s many a fur hat and many a case of vodka were bought under pressure of deadline by poor drudges from the West with rubles burning a hole in their pockets. The clerks at the GUM Department Store in Red Square must have seen them coming for miles. But in May 1973, a dozen years before glasnost, the Soviets finally joined the Geneva Copyright Convention and now dutifully send foreign authors their royalties on books published after that date. Payments are made in the foreign currency of the writer’s preference. Some time soon—a few months or a few years? I wasn’t able to pin anyone down—they were expected to become signatories of the Berne Convention as well and then pay up on books predating 1973. Of course, publisher-author relations had always been touchy, with some writers, Americans particularly, refusing to cooperate with the Soviet Union. Tom Wolfe, for example, would not permit Progress to print a large portion of The Right Stuff, though he relented and allowed them to produce his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.
In the West writers receive a percentage—usually 10 percent—of the retail price of the book, but in the Soviet Union they were paid according to the number of “signatures,” which in the Soviet equation amounted to approximately 25 pages of typescript, as well as the “circulation,” or size of the print run; actual sales, or the speed of sales, were irrelevant. This allowed the publisher to calculate the sum in advance (and pay 25 percent of it on signing the contract, 35 percent when typesetting was completed, and the final 40 percent on publication). But all this would change soon, for the whole process of getting the books to the readers was undergoing dramatic alteration, like so much else in the country. Formerly all newly printed books from all publishers went to the Book Union, a monopoly trade organization that supplied all the shops and took one-quarter of the retail price. And those prices, like all other financial details, were set out by Goskompechat, the state committee for publishing, printing, and book-selling. “But two days ago,” Faingar informed me, “the directors of 300 houses met in this building to establish the Soviet Publishing Association,” with the purpose of finding a way to arrive at prices based upon what the market will bear. “This may be the beginning of the end of the Book Union’s monopoly on bookselling,” he said. “Maybe in a year’s time there won’t even be a state committee for publishing.”
Far more so, I believe, than in literature, Moscow at this time was particularly rich in the visual arts, and I was fortunate to be able to see a variety of new work and various related activity. I was most pleased, for example, by a visit to an art auction preview, though it was a rather anemic affair by Western standards, held in an ugly, mostly vacant light-industrial space down by the river that bore the same name relationship to the London and New York sale rooms as the dreariest Moscow café bears to a four-star restaurant. But it was rewarding in a number of ways. Although without doubt much of Russia’s movable past—books, pictures, antiques, and the like—was destroyed during successive revolutions and wars, it was probably not subjected to a deliberate policy of mass destruction except briefly when the Bolsheviks took power (quite a different situation from China’s during the days of the Red Guards). Rather, it simply became irrelevant; Lenin’s mission after all was to build a new world; new was the operative word. That the export of all art and antiquities of the remotest consequence was prohibited for so many decades contributed to the strength of the pool, as did the low level of disposable income. Now, in the secondhand bookshops, and not just those found among the upscale souvenir places in the Arbat, the European custom of selling old books under the same roof as pictures and prints seemed to be creating some bargains for collectors. Nothing of great importance in the art-historical sense, perhaps, but plenty of attic clutter from late tsarist times, which in shop windows or in the auction preview I mentioned hung side by side with minor contemporary work—not amateur but not really professional either—from which it was often indistinguishable in terms of manner.
This is an important point, it seems to me: the sheer force of accumulated tradition is a question young artists there must come to terms with. The response that painters and sculptors formulate is one of the many factors that determine whether they will be official artists or avant-garde ones. The former term did not change its meaning much under perestroika; such artists are not like those in the Stalin era, working on huge murals of heroic workers marching behind tractors, but they did resemble the social realists of old in that they were members of the U.S.S.R. Artists’ Guild or a similar body. Avant-garde takes a little more defining, and I was lucky in having a skilled explainer who could also get me inside studios representative of the two types of artists.
Maria Pustukhova, 26, was born in the closed city of Vladivostok in the Far East when her mother was the first woman in local television there; her father was a creative writer who then became a journalist with Pravda, which brought the family to Moscow when Maria was 12. Shopping trips to Prague helped her to cultivate the Western appearance admired by Soviet young people, at least of those in the big cities, but her look was altogether more stylish than the usual blue jeans and Reeboks. She was an art critic and art historian. “I live for the avant-garde,” she told me as a plain statement of fact, without any of the faux-drama such phrases carry in English. She and I scampered along to a small street behind Starokonyushenny Lane, where the Canadian embassy is located, to the two-room basement apartment that Alexei Mironov used as his sculpture studio. The space, quite separate from the flat where he lived, in another part of the city, was crammed with works in stone, clay, wood, plaster, and various metals. Sometimes a painter friend used the space as well, and as we descended the dark steps we caught the faint smell of turps, which all studio-hounds love, whether they admit it or not.
Mironov, not yet 30, got a sound start. Both his parents were recognized artists, and he graduated from the Stroganov College of Industrial Design when he was 22. For monumental works he sometimes employed assistants, in the traditional manner. Maria told me going in, “He is very rich for an artist”—to the extent that he owned an automobile, or did until quite recently. By Soviet standards he was richer in experience: he had been to the West. He was represented in several public collections in the Soviet Union and in private ones there and elsewhere. In the past couple of years he had been able to accept invitations to visit Britain—first Glasgow, then London—where he had pieces in group exhibitions.
I noticed that like many of the young artists whose work I saw, Mironov used quite a lot of found materials (one exhibition of kinetic Rube Goldberg-like structures included a room-size contraption that incorporated everything from hand saws to skis to an old pram). I was bound to ask whether this element was part of his aesthetic or indicated that the flow of normal supplies was tenuous. “Not problem getting what I need,” he replied. “I deal with, you know, Soviet robbers.” He laughed, but I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, for he was a nervously gregarious fellow. Later he played Russian folk songs on his guitar and poured brandies all round and offered slices of what I first took to be a piece of wood, for it looked like a carpenter’s leavings, but turned out to be an Armenian
