'The Poet Kept Smiling'

“I greeted the books with the joy and relief usually reserved for long-lost family members: here was the cure for loneliness, frustration, and boredom; here was the portal into other worlds that I could inhabit instead of the coldly unintelligible one in which I found myself.” 

After reading Maria Bloshteyn’s essay “A Motherland of Books,” I felt pampered and ungrateful for the ease with which I have always been able to acquire, read and often keep nearly any book I wanted. Living when and where I do, the censors, book burners and militant illiterates can’t touch me or my books. Bloshteyn, who left the Soviet Union with her family in 1979, quotes “Émigré Library” by her fellow Russian émigré Boris Dralyuk, who asks: “Our library is open, but for whom?”

Among the infrequently acknowledged virtues of books is consolation. Those we know well are portable, hospitable alternate worlds, homes away from home. Think of the Bible, Shakespeare, Conrad. Nabokov once referred to “those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces.” A blogger recently bragged that he doesn’t read books that make him feel comfortable. That can be dismissed as showboating machismo, of course, but it also suggests a sad poverty of imagination, the absence of an aesthetic and perhaps a moral sense. Most readers, thank God, don’t read like self-regarding postmodern critics. Bloshteyn writes:

 

“The Soviet Union proclaimed itself to be the best-read country in the world. This boast was largely true. If you got onto a bus or a streetcar in the seventies, most passengers would be reading. Entertainment at home—where television meant two or three channels of largely boring programming—was also reading.”

 

Read the passages in which Bloshteyn describes her family’s love for Pushkin. For those of us in the Anglosphere, substitute Shakespeare. Reading her essay, I felt pampered and ungrateful for the ease with which I can acquire, read and often keep nearly any book I wish. Living when and where I do, the censors, book burners and militant illiterates can’t yet touch me or my books. Bloshteyn describes culling volumes from her shelves in Canada and donating some of them to a library. I recently endured a comparable experience, undertaken mostly to make way for new volumes:

 

“The books I’m leaving at the book sale will be someone’s windfall to be treasured. Yet, I still feel like I am betraying the books. Their aged, weathered covers exude reproach. I might as well, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, be drowning them deeper than did ever plummet sound. I go again through the books that I’m giving away, pull several out of the boxes and set them aside, take a deep breath, and drive the boxes to the library.”

 

Recall the thoughts of another Russian reader and writer driven from his homeland:

 

“There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet [Nikolay] Gumilev was put to death by Lenin’s ruffians thirty odd years ago [1921] was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor’s dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.” 

 

[The Nabokov passages are taken from his Lectures on Literature (1980).]