In my student days I began a career in
writing, translating poetry from English into Russian and the other way, and
also writing short stories. But this career was cut short by the attentions of
censors who took it in their heads to squash me as a representative of the
trend known in the 1950s as stilyagi (something like "fops,"
"dandies"). I had very little to do with that crowd, actually disliked them,
but that was impossible to prove once the officials labeled one with something
they could understand. So I stopped all
attempts to publish my stuff, though I continued writing both poetry and prose
all my life "for the bottom drawer." The Russian expression is pisat'v stol "write for the desk" - a well-known exercise among internal
émigrés until the mid 1980s.
I switched to a career in theoretical
linguistics, publishing some 60 papers and four monographs over some 20 years. Intellectual
curiosity took me far beyond linguistics proper into such fields as theory of
probability and mathematical statistics, information theory, mathematical logic
(at one time I attended lectures and seminars on algorithms and recursive
functions at a Physics and Mathematics Department), psycholinguistics, etc.
Apart from a few publications, these studies did not affect my outward career
much, although at the time the process afforded me distinct intellectual
enjoyment.
In terms of tenure, I served as Associate
Professor and head of departments of English Philology at a number of
provincial higher educational establishments, which taught me a few things
about handling other human beings - always a difficult job for an introvert. Towards
the end of the 70s, no longer able to contain my disgust with the shenanigans
so rife in the academic jungle (in which Party officials played a lusty role),
I gave up my academic career for freelancing, mostly as translator.
I had had some experience doing translation
jobs for Moscow
publishers, so the transition was not too hard.
In the years that followed I translated dozens of books from Russian
into English (sometimes from French or German into English) - prose, poetry,
philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics, mathematical logic, literary theory and
criticism, psychology, systems analysis, and God knows what else.
Of the poetic translations, most memorable
are books and separate poems by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Vysotsky, Boris
Pasternak, Iosif Brodsky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and many,
too many others, poets and pseudo-poets. The translations appeared partly in
volume form, partly in the then widely known Soviet Literature magazine. That journal also published some of my
prose translations, such as TheLast Pastoral by the late Ales
Adamovich, whom I came to know fairly well. I still have somewhere in my
archives an unpublished script about the Chernobyl
disaster for a film he planned to produce together with Stanley Cramer.
Since about age 14, when I first read
Plekhanov's book on the monistic view of history, I had a penchant for
philosophy, especially the Greeks, and at one time studied the subject rather
systematically. That was the reason why, decades later, I willingly took up translation,
for Progress Publishers, of works by Evald Ilyenkov, Merab Mamardashvili, Aleksei
F. Losev, and other fine philosophers. I also translated a few of the lesser known
works of Marx and Engels from German and French into English for their Complete Works (it was then being
published in London),
and half of Volume Four of the Complete Works
of Georgy Plekhanov.
I must say that these jobs brought one true
intellectual contentment. For this, however, I sometimes had to translate, on
the quid pro quo principle, piles of trash, like a volume entitled Historical Materialism, which I mentally
christened the biggest collection of lies between two covers. An 800-page long textbook
of Marxist philosophy by a certain gentleman called Spirkin was in the same
vein. There must have been other stuff which I, thank God, have by now
forgotten.
In the post-Perestroika period I published
numerous short stories, features, articles and reviews, mostly in English, in
such magazines as Moscow Guardian
(defunct), Glas, Moscow Magazine (twice defunct), Capital Perspective (defunct), Russian
Life, Perspective, and in Moscow's
English-language papers: Moscow Times,
Moscow News, Moscow Tribune (defunct).
In 1995-2003, with interruptions, I
published, on a weekly basis, essays on the history of Perestroika in the Moscow News; general title, Collapse of the Colossus (that was the
last choice; in the course of the publication there were others). In this way a
rather bulky volume accumulated. I never made any attempts to publish it,
though some interest was displayed both by specialists and laymen. I am still
working on it, on and off.
All my life I hiked a great deal, did some
mountaineering (until a bad fall some time in the sixties), and generally went
in for escapism in a big way. I covered most of the Soviet Union, sailed all
over the Caspian, the Aral, and other places, mostly solo, and much preferring
the wilder, pristine areas (what is in Russian known as nenaselenka "uninhabited areas"). In the process, I accumulated
heaps of diaries or better say logs.
Some of these made the basis of a tale of
adventure (rather, an undersized novel) entitled Taiga Law. Originally written in English as a short story, it sort
of swelled to larger proportions in the process of translation, and the English
text was rewritten accordingly. It was printed in 2002.
The novel Solo on the Aral followed the same pattern. Written in English in
1994 over a period of some three months, it took some twelve years to be
translated into Russian, swelling in the process to some 500+ pages. It was
eventually published in 2007 in Russian by the Evrasia+ Publishers (available
at www.vosres.info ). I do not believe I
will ever be able to re-translate it into English - there are lots of other
things to do first.
The post-Perestroika years brought several
editorial jobs in succession. For a while I served as deputy editor-in-chief of
the Soviet Union's first glossy, Moscow Magazine, published in English
and Russian. In 1995 the magazine
perished through penury after being forsaken by its founder Derk Sauer, the
current owner of a publishing empire in Russia. I felt sorry for its
demise, it was a good enough magazine, quite artistic, and the content was OK -
we did our best.
Then for ten years, 1995-2004, I was chief
editor of the Moscow News weekly.
Before my arrival MN was a sorry
sight indeed, even if I say so myself - a collection of ridiculous, garbled
English translations of articles from the Russian sister paper Moskovskie Novosti. I made it into a far
more independent publication. My motives in doing so were varied; part of the
reason was that I drifted away from the ideology and, most importantly, from
the political line of radical liberalism characteristic of the "democrats of
the first wave," of whom I was in fact one.
After MN
was sold, in 2003, to Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin, the YUKOS oligarchs (there was
a cover-up, but the actual owners were these individuals), I continued to work
for a few months in my former capacity. I was not fired on the spot, as was
Victor Loshak, chief editor of the Russian paper, but it was clear to me from
the start that I would not be able to work along with the new management (such
as the well-known TV killer Yevgeny Kiselev). So in the end I quietly sent in
my resignation by email and left the paper that I regarded as a sort of my
brainchild. That was sad, of course, but one had to be realistic - they would
have squeezed me out without fail, and I would be lucky to escape with my life;
the pressure was picayune but relentless, and my heart, which by that time had
a couple of bypasses thrown into it, was not up to it.
For a few months I felt as free as the
wind, and even put in a couple of memorable trips, paddling down the Vetluga in
Russia's north and the Akhtuba in the south, all in one season, but was soon
recruited as editor of the English language webzine www.intelligent.ru
(2005-2006). It is still referred to in various blogs as "defunct but fondly
remembered." The circumstances of its death are too nasty to be remembered.
That's it, in brief. A great many details
of my life I have put into Taiga Law
and Solo on the Aral, and into my
short stories and travelogues, which I recommend to anyone interested enough.
Sergei Roy