upset with a copy of Ogoniok, a Moscow magazine detested by all of my acquaintances in Moscow. “A friend of mine, who is also a teacher,” she said, “brought me this magazine; I’ve read it from cover to cover, and I’ve barely been able to sleep since. I still can’t believe it, but the fact is that something serious is happening on the other side of our border. Revolution! Not even in ’68 did they write things like that here.” We began to work that day on a very well written article about Meyerhold’s final days of freedom and the monstrous persecution to which he was subjected at the end. The help of Eisenstein, one of his best friends, to save his archive and a few documents, if the worst were to happen. The article ended with the chronicle of his arrest as well as different versions of his death and the prison camp to which he had been sent.
By this time, I was not only watching the Soviet channel on Saturdays for the theater programs; I was also following the daily newscast. And every week I would stop by the Russian newspaper store, which was no longer the desolate space it once was, to pick up a copy of Ogoniok, which I paid for in advance because it usually sold out within a few hours of arriving. Ogoniok! It seemed inconceivable that Ogoniok had been rehabilitated, had become decent! For many years it was a weekly. During the Khrushchev period, it became a publication of monstrous intolerance, of a repressive police mentality. It was headed at the time by Vsevolod Kochetov, one of the organic writers of Stalinism, a mediocre novelist, primitive to the point of exaggeration. After that leech, even more powerful reactionary forces followed, linked to the repressive apparatus. Kochetov ferociously insulted the intellectuals of the Thaw, the old ones because they dared to say what they had kept silent for so many years, the young ones because they expressed themselves disrespectfully and without fear. The target on which he unleashed most of his animosity was the magazine Novy Mir, and its director Aleksandr Tvardovsky, who dared to publish some of the literature that had been banned for a long time, among other things Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel that caused an unbelievable uproar. Kochetov disappeared shortly thereafter and plunged into personal and literary infamy. His primitivism and vileness did him in. When he spoke of the Jews he did so with the language of the pogrom; the hardliners demanded more cryptic individuals to continue, but more efficiently, what the former barbarian said. The Ogoniok that I read in Prague was a brave, fresh, modern, well-written publication. It had taken on the task of cleaning up the Stalinist as well as recent past, the economic and political paralysis and corruption of the immediate past. When I read an issue, I sensed a breath of oxygen that triggered in me an enormous sympathy for what was happening in the Soviet world. Compared to the Czech Plateau, its lethargy, its passive fatalism, this was an invitation to life and, in my case, a stimulus for creativity.
Later, when what happened and the way it happened passed, I found in Elias Canetti’s autobiographical notes a few lines with which I feel a deep kinship:
Orphans—all of us who wagered on Gorbachev, half the world, the whole world. For decades, I never believed so strongly in anyone, all my hopes were pinned on him; I would have prayed for him—I would have denied myself. But I am not ashamed of it at all.1
At the end of the day, I’m not going to write about Prague, I’ll do that later, but that magical city led me to other excerpts from my diary: to the country of great achievements and horrific turmoil.
It was an unexpected trip. In early 1986, four years after my arrival in Prague, I unexpectedly received an invitation from the Union of Writers of Georgia to visit the republic in May. Georgia had suddenly become famous because of the subversive nature of its films, and was regarded as one of the strongholds of perestroika, the word that denoted the transformation initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR. I was invited to spend a few days in the capital Tbilisi and its surroundings as a writer, not as a member of the Foreign Service, not to participate in a conference, nor to celebrate a centennial of a national hero. I accepted, of course. I began to recall things. A strip of contemporary Georgia was once the famous Colchis, the homeland of Medea, that long-lost place where Jason and the Argonauts arrived in quest for the Golden Fleece. A few days later, the Ministry of Foreign Relations informed me that the Ministry of Culture of the USSR was extending an invitation for me to travel to Moscow from the 20th to the 30th of May of that year. They requested a lecture on some aspect of Mexican literature, which I was free to choose. The invitation came from the Union of Soviet Writers. I assumed it was in response to the letter from Georgia, so that the world would know that it was the metropole that continued to decide when and to whom invitations were extended and that everything else was a vague and wide-ranging peripheral space.
From the moment I arrived in Moscow, I began to inquire about my departure to Tbilisi, but the bureaucrats who welcomed me avoided the question; they would change the subject, or at most they would say that they were in contact with their Georgian colleagues to establish my travel schedule. “You have lived here and know how the Caucasians are, people from the South, friends of the sea, of the sun, but much more of wine and celebration, they lose track of time, we know them very well and so do not worry. In the end, they work everything out,” and they added that in the meantime they would be my hosts, and were pleased to assist me in Moscow and Leningrad, a city they had not mentioned until then. Then, in Leningrad, I was informed that the Georgians were devastated that they were not able to welcome me, because as is always the case in spring, tourism exceeds all possibilities of accommodation. They should know because they had already had embarrassing incidents such as this, but that’s how they were, pleasure-seekers, people of the beach, sun, wine. Nothing rattled them, they were happy people, pagan, yes, good at dance and singing, no one was better, with a wild imagination, an ancient and refined folklore, but definitely careless, chaotic, irresponsible, even dangerous in some ways, one could say…They proposed that I go to Ukraine instead of Georgia. Compared to ancient Kiev, Tbilisi was little more than a picturesque village, they said. I knew that Ukraine and its capital Kiev were extremely beautiful places, but I also knew that in recent decades its cultural institutions were the most resistant to any social, political, or aesthetic change, and that the arts in that republic continued to follow the strictures of socialist realism from 1933, directed by unimaginative, mediocre, and unscrupulous party officials.
I was about to cancel the trip. Apparently, a game of equivocations had begun, which I no longer wished to play. I had all my luggage ready, so I left for the airport, believing that I would go to Prague, but instead I went to Tbilisi. And, despite the bad omen, the trip was wonderful. I witnessed something unique: the first steps of a dinosaur that had been frozen for a long time. There were beginnings of life everywhere. It was a consecration of their spring, celebrated amid thousands of obstacles, traps, faces marked by hatred. Something of that, I hope, will be translated into the notes that I was able to scribble on airplanes and buses and in cafés and hotel rooms.
1 I have been unable to locate either the English translation or the original quote. The only reference to the quote in Spanish I found was in an article titled “Delayed Effects” in La Jornada Semanal, April 13, 1997, where the quote is attributed to Canetti’s “notes from 1993.” (I have endeavored to cite existing English translations of all quotations. In some cases, I was unable to locate either the original source of the quote or an English translation. In such cases, the translation is mine. —Trans.)
Two hours into the flight and the feeling of having forgotten, as is always the case, things I will need during the trip. Mrs. A., a television official, whom I run into frequently in airports and on airplanes, and also at diplomatic receptions, suddenly changed places and came to sit beside me. From that moment on, she talks non-stop. It’s the same every time I see her, and no matter what we’re talking about, she manages to change the subject, always to the same one, which, apparently, obsesses her. She travels frequently, attending film and television festivals in Spain and Latin America. She loves to talk about her trips and her experiences;
