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Date: Sat, 21 May 2005
From: Sergei Roy <sergeiroy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Sakharov biography
A Shoddy Monument
May 21 is the birthday of Andrei Sakharov, one of the men who helped
shape the destiny of the Soviet Union by his scientific and later political
activities. Regrettably, no proper biography of the man has so far been written,
and the vacuum is sometimes filled with potboilers of the worst description.
By Sergei Roy
Editor, www.intelligent.ru
Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov (19211989), physicist turned civil rights activist and politician, Thrice Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Stalin and Nobel prizes, full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and of several foreign academies, was unarguably a genius and a great and tragic figure. His greatness was intrinsic and generally recognized by both the scientific and civil communities. The tragedy of his life is also quite apparent. A hereditary member of that curious, idiosyncratic societal structure, the Russian intelligentsia, and thus, by definition, a humanist, he was instrumental in inventing and improving that most inhuman of weapons of mass destruction, the H-bomb. Instrumental, hell: he created it. Then, as a civil rights champion and politician, he played a leading role in the political movement that brought about the downfall of the Soviet regime. Now, more than a decade later, it is clear that, for Russia, the political gains of that collapse in terms of freedom and democracy are fairly modest, while the cost in human suffering and violation of the supreme human right, the right to life, is nothing short of appalling. Suffice it to mention that life expectancy in this country has dropped way below retirement age, with Russia’s population dying out at the rate of a round million a year. A state of affairs that forcefully reminds one of Joseph Brodsky’s dictum: “In a real tragedy, it’s not the hero who dies, it’s the chorus.”
One would expect these themes to dominate any insightful biography of Andrei Sakharov. From the present historical perspective, his true stature and meaning of his life and work should stand out clearer: Bol’shoye viditsya na rasstoyanyi “Great things are better seen from a distance,” as the poet Sergei Yesenin pit it. Nor are the sources lacking for a fundamental and objective presentation and assessment of the facts of Sakharov’s life. In Russian periodicals alone, myriad comments and reminiscences appear, say, on the annual occasions of Sakharov’s birth and death (the latest birthday was 21 May), not to mention the specialist monographs. Hundreds of Sakharov’s academic colleagues and political allies, friends and foes are still alive and waiting to be interviewed.
However, as far as Richard Lourie’s Sakharov. A Biography is concerned, they wait in vain. On Lourie’s own showing, the few people he interviewed are a couple of Sakharov’s colleagues who have moved to the United States and members of his family: his widow Elena Bonner, Bonner’s daughter Tatiana Yankelevich, who is director of the Andrei Sakharov Archives at Brandeis University (which apparently solicited and published the book), Efrem Yankelevich, and Sakharov’s daughters living in Moscow.
Lourie’s prime printed sources are the Memoirs of Andrei Sakharov himself (translated again by Lourie), a few of Sakharov’s other works, the writings of Elena Bonner, and some collected obituaries. The “biography” is, in fact, little more than a compilation of these materials, a scissors-and-paste job. It is certainly a useful compendium for those disinclined to read the originals, but that is as far as it goes.
Sakharov’s Memoirs, though they suffer from the natural limitations of subjectivity and modesty, offer fine insights into the great man’s actions, thoughts and feelings, but they are Sakharov’s memoirs, and this is no place for their evaluation. This reviewer is thus reduced to commenting on Lourie’s own meager, and often fanciful, contribution to his subject matter.
To achieve the semblance of a well-researched “biography,” Lourie sprinkles page-long quotes from the Memoirs, some in quotation marks, some not, with masses of extraneous material, padding the book out to its length of 460 pages. Of the 128 references listed in the “bibliography,” only 21 have something to do directly with Sakharov (including the above-mentioned writings of Sakharov himself and of Bonner), while the rest seem to be there for the padding-out purposes only. As a result, the book often reads as a catalogue of irrelevancies.
We are told that the “novelist Vladimir Nabokov was gifted with a… form of synesthesia,” and his mother was “optically affected by musical notes”; what the poet Alexander Blok wrote on the sinking of the Titanic; that Lloyd George mistook Kharkov, the name of a city, for a general; that Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with conditioned reflexes “made him the first Russian to win a Nobel Prize”; that Nikolai Fyodorov was a philosopher “who had a great influence on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the pioneer of Russian rocketry, and who was the only person in whose presence the great Leo Tolstoy felt humble”; that John Reed, “who wrote a vivid eyewitness account of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and whose ashes were emplaced in the Kremlin wall, and Dean Read, an American rock singer who was popular later under Brezhnev,” had last names that were pronounced similar to Mayne Reid; that the French word bistro comes from the Cossacks’ orders, “Make it snappy,” to French waiters in 1812. Lourie apparently tries to put in the book all he knows, or thinks he knows, about anything remotely connected with Russia. Some pages are so crammed with this doodling that one might be excused for forgetting the book’s subject matter.
Indeed, one often gets the impression that the author himself forgets his theme and is only concerned with filling page after page with words, words, words, quoted and misquoted. A few pages on the Battle of the Kursk Bulge, with notes on what Stalin, Zhukov, Manstein etc. said and did, as if Sakharov could be privy to their doings at the time. More pages on Beria’s bad manners and incipient friction between Stalin and Beria, again light years away from Sakharov’s scope of knowledge and concerns in that period. A couple of pages on the sad story of Pasternak’s phone talk with Stalin and the imbroglio attendant on awarding him the Nobel prize and his rejection of it; no conceivable link with Sakharov’s life except that another general secretary later also used the telephone to talk to Sakharov. Thanks, Mr. Bell. A couple of pages on the story of the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Sakharov must have read, along with a few million others. A page that looks like a clipping from a short encyclopedia on who Maxim Gorky was. And so it goes. The padding-out process, I mean.
These irrelevancies could perhaps be excused as having to do with “background,” if it weren’t for the author’s excruciating sloppiness. The attention of anyone with even a layman’s knowledge of Russian history, culture, literature etc. is snagged at almost every page on what might politely be called silly bloopers.
“Two Steps Forward, One Step Back,” was not what Lenin said, and least of all was it the “perfect slogan” he found for the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s (p. 21, repeated at p.391); in fact, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back was the title of his book, published in 1904, which had nothing to do with economic policies of any sort and everything to do with denouncing Mensheviks and laying down the conceptual groundwork for a political party “of the new type.”
Russians do not “conjur (sic!) the Terror by referring to the worst year in an absolutely minimal formulation not even 1937, but ’37” (p.46). Absolute bunkum. Dropping the first two words tysyacha devyatsot in Russian numerals for years, which even native speakers find a bit of a tongue-twister, is a linguistic habit that applies to any year of the past century, not just 1937. I was born v tridtsat’ shestom, not v tysyacha devyatsot tridtsat’ shestom, unless I wish to sound pedantic.
Oblomovshchina (“Oblomovitis”) did not diagnose the “illness that kept the best of the nation from rising against tsarist injustice” (p.65); that’s an interpretation that must have made Ivan Goncharov, the creator of the character of Oblomov and a faithful censor in the service of the Czar, turn in his grave. It’s no use telling Mr. Lourie that Oblomov’s conflict, if conflict it was, was not with “tsarist injustice” (what a laugh!), but with Stolz and the likes of Stolz. He wouldn’t understand. And, of course, it never entered his head to ask someone who does know what oblomovshchina is; practically any Russian speaker could have explained it to him.
Russian obyekt does not mean “objective”, “in military parlance” or any other (p.111), it simply means object, thing or facility. It just shows what sort of credentials Lourie has as a translator from Russian. Russian peasant women do not wear, have never worn, “wooden clogs”: Lurie clearly confuses Russian peasantry with the sabot-wearing French. Kosygin was never “the official head of state” (p.193), he was the premier: the official head of state in Soviet Russia was the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, which Kosygin never was. The description of Yuri Olesha, that most sensitive of Russia’s literary craftsmen, as “a satirist” (p.238) is a misnomer to end all misnomers. Undergraduates at Soviet universities did not write “dissertations,” nor do they do so now (p.248). Yuri Afanasyev, now rector of the Russian State Humanities University, is very much a man, not the woman Afanasyeva, as Lourie makes him out to be, while the poetess Akhmatova (a pseudonym borrowed from a Tatar grandmother, not a married name, as Lourie would have us believe) was all woman and could under no circumstances be referred to as “Akhmatov” (p.445): she had a string of husbands, but none called Akhmatov. Sumgait is not a “suburb” of Baku (p. 367): just take a look at the map.
Some of Lourie’s comic strip forays into history, apart from being totally irrelevant, will make not just every Russian, but any person of sense, not to mention sensibility, squirm. On the subject of the Soviet armies’ fighting in Germany in 1945, the only thing he deems proper to dwell upon at length is the number of German women raped by the Soviet troops, quoting profusely from his own previous book. He might at least mention that more than 300,000 of those troops were in no position to rape anyone, having fallen in the Battle of Berlin alone. Whether all US and British troops liberating Europe were perfect gentlemen, and what Andrei Sakharov had to do with any of this, are questions better not asked.
A most unpleasant feature of Lourie’s book is the amount of idle guesswork in it. The KGB especially is a fertile subject for exercising the author’s imagination. The Sakharovs were engaged in a very real struggle with that formidable organization; no wonder they were somewhat overwrought and tended to see the hand of the KGB in any unpleasantness that happened to them. A grandchild throws up? The KGB is immediately suspect. Windshield wipers stolen? The KGB is to blame again. However, what is understandable in the heat of battle, so to speak, is less so in a purportedly serious biography: one would welcome some documentation and/or confirmation from independent sources. Lourie imposes no such constraints on his labors, and some of his fancies are positively ludicrous. Thus, he earnestly states that Yeltsin lost a couple of fingers “when pilfering grenades to fight the Germans” (p.381); a look at the map would have shown him that Butka, Yeltsin’s village in the Urals, was thousands of miles from the nearest German. Another flight of fancy, and we are told that the “h” in the word “Kazakhstan” was “there because of the way Stalin, with his Georgian accent, pronounced the country’s name” (p.407), as if the Kazakhs’ (or, for that matter, purebred Russians’) way of saying “Kazakh” had nothing to do with the spelling. The book positively teems with this sort of inanities.
These are just a few indications of what makes Lourie’s book, where it is not a recap of, or a string of quotes from, the writings of Sakharov and related literature, positively unreadable. A poor monument indeed to a great man, whose real biography is yet to be written.
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