Going Back - II

(continued)

I’d grown up in Edinburgh, Scotland, far away from the complexities of East European politics, but had had at least some small experience of “physical compulsion” at the school I attended, which in itself in those distant days pf the 1950s was probably not unlike a totalitarian entity of some kind, with its cult of obedience, its prefects, its canings and beatings, and its assertion of a monolithic, corporate identity. None the less, at that school I’d learned some foreign languages, in particular German and Russian, and on entering Edinburgh University found after a couple of years that I would have to decide which course to follow – and opted for Russian. The reason for that was fairly simple, I think: the classes in the German department, like those in the French department, were over-attended and dogged by teaching that was old-fashioned and remote. The number of students in the Russian department, by contrast, was much smaller, and there was the opportunity of taking classes that were really more like tutorials or seminars, with young professors who were at home in their subjects – some of them were émigrés from the Soviet Union, and they had an inside knowledge of Russian literature, history and culture, which they made available to us. In my third of year of study I began to attend regular seminars and lectures on the history of Russian literature, all the way from the medieval byliny and the Slovo o polku Igoreve, through Baratynsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, up to the Silver Age, Futurism and the early Soviet period. The seminars, like the lectures, were almost exclusively conducted in the Russian language. Running concurrently with them was a two-year course in Russian and Soviet history, and a one-year series of lectures in Russian social thought. There was also instruction in Russian syntax and grammar, and a course in linguistics.

The Soviet Union itself featured in the coursework only from time to time, and mainly in the history and social thought components of the study – though there was also a special course in Soviet literature. Unlike the other modern language courses, French and German, for example, the Russian course did not include an obligatory third year spent in the country being studied – for this, one had to wait until one’s postgraduate work began. This was mainly because the Soviet authorities didn’t have an exchange program for humanities undergraduates – their focus was exclusively on postgraduate work in the natural sciences. The “cultural and scientific exchanges” between the Soviet Union and the West were in fact quite unequal, as while a large number of the Western students who visited the USSR were involved in the study of history, language or literature, practically all the Soviet students who visited Western Europe, Canada and the United States were science postgraduates. The reasons for this are obvious: the Soviet authorities feared that arts graduates would become influenced by Western ideas and thinking. Most Soviet arts graduates could not travel to the West.

Occasionally the Russian department received visits from Soviet writers and public figures, but these were nearly all rather obscure – no one had ever heard of the “poet “ who arrived one day, accompanied by two “minders”, with a slim volume of verse in written in the most austere and conventional social realist style. He was an engaging man, who had taken part in the defence of Moscow in 1941, and had later fought in tank battles – he told us that all the skin had been burnt from his body, and had had to be re-grown. As a military man, he was interested in the technical problem of how best to scale the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, and I remember that we students spent a long time discussing the logistical details of this with him, as it was good practice for our knowledge of Russian.

Our knowledge of dissident - i.e. contemporary, non-social realist - Soviet writing was rather limited, though we did get rather well acquainted with the writing of the Soviet emigration of the 1920s and 30s through the efforts of one senior staff member who had left the USSR in the mid-1950s. The emphasis in the modern literature teaching to be on the social realist Soviet novel – Leonov, Sholokhov, Fadeyev, Simonov, and so on, though the classical literature course, which ended at 1917, also included the early modernist poetry of Symbolism, Futurism and Acmeism.

Studying Russian and Soviet history and literature in early 1960s Britain was an odd experience. Students from other departments who didn’t know much about the subject were often rather jealous, and imagined that we were somehow helping to further the cultural revolution that was starting to break out in Western society then. When we tried to explain to them just how conservative and even reactionary much of the ideology that underpinned most post-war 20th century Soviet writing really was, they couldn’t understand, and I think it was then that I began to have some inkling of the divide that separated East and West. There was also, at the beginning of my studies, the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, and the theme of the “bomb”, and its possible consequences, persisted throughout the four years. And, as we never failed to remember, the actor who played James Bond on the cinema screen had been born just round the corner from our departmental lecture and seminar rooms.

At the end of my fourth year, I took the final examination, and got a 2:1 Honours degree in Russian with German. I could then proceed to the writing of a Ph.D. dissertation, which took another four years, and entailed several periods of research in the Soviet Union. It subject was the work of the Russian Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky. I completed the dissertation in 1971, and received my doctorate in the same year.

(to be continued)

See also: Going Back