Katrina Keegan (4th-year Winner)
Essay
Manuscripts Don't Burn, and Reading Russian Literature Won't Burn Me
At first glance, my collection seems rather normal: Soviet-era editions of famous Russian classics. In the course of over two years living and travelling in the former Soviet Union from 2015 to 2019, I have amassed, more or less, the cannon skimmed by Russian high school students and analyzed in first-year survey courses at St. Petersburg State University. The books themselves are just as normal as the stories they contain. Like everything in the Soviet Union, these books were mass-produced and now cost a couple dollars each. I have acquired my books from Moldovan flea markets, hole-in-the-wall used bookstores in St. Petersburg, and hipster cafes in Tallinn, Estonia, where they were merely used for decoration. I negotiated down the price of Pushkin fairytales while wine-drunk on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia. At a market in Kyiv, I found matching copies of Nikolai Gogol’s Mirgorod Tales for myself and my boyfriend, who is a Peace Corps volunteer in that very Mirgorod, Ukraine. Yet despite the fact that my collection is a typical assortment of famous books from the past, it was collected in the spirit of a defiant commitment to the future.
Reading and writing was sometimes an act of defiance in the Soviet Union, which was infamous for censorship. Many of the volumes in my collection, such as We by Yevgeniy Zamyatin and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, bear publication dates from Glasnost in the late 1980s, when they were first released in the Soviet Union – officially. They circulated under- the-table before that. One of my most-prized items is a samizdat (self-published) copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s banned book Master and Margarita. Browsing a tiny used bookstore in a courtyard in St. Petersburg, I immediately recognized the unmarked cover, single-sided pages, and blocky letters that proved some brave literature-lover spent hours copying the novel, word-for-word, on a typewriter. The most famous line in the book, “manuscripts don’t burn,” is a metafictional statement about censorship: the main character tried to burn his novel to protect himself from censors, just like Bulgakov himself, who burned an early draft of Master and Margarita. As the quote shows, however, censorship isn’t just a sentence to a labor camp or a sentence crossed off by a bureaucrat’s red pen. Censorship is self-censorship, the choice to burn your own words, to deny yourself literature in the face of society’s disapproval.
I avoided Master and Margarita – hailed by many Russians as their favorite novel – for a long time because of a different kind of self-censorship. In building my collection of Russian literature, I faced the disapproval of librarians and Russian-language teachers, host parents and booksellers, all of whom wanted to censor my reading choices. They may not have cared about my political ideology, but they had strong feelings about my Russian language skills. In the same way parents and teachers may worry a child is too young to “get” high-brow literature, my host parents and language teachers fretted that I had insufficient reading comprehension skills for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. They repeatedly implored me to read children’s fairy tales or women’s romance novels, praising my friend who had undertaken to read a translation of “Garry” Potter.
They were completely right. I didn’t “get” the Russian classics I was reading. During my gap year in Moldova, where I was intensively studying Russian, I obtained a subscription to my local library. The first book I selected was Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. I was so excited that I refused to let my host mother put it in her purse, because I wanted to hold it the entire way home. Mikhail Lermontov writes in A Hero of Our Time, one of my favorite novels, that “passion is nothing but ideas as they first develop.” In my state of relatively early linguistic development, I was desperately passionate about these words, characters, ideas. I read Three
Sisters on the trolleybus, during breaks in class, before bed. I read it again, translating and writing down all the words I didn’t know. I then read Wikipedia, and realized the entire plot, which centers around one of the main characters having an affair, had completely gone over my head. But as Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “In order to know love, you have to mess up and then right yourself.” Reading Russian literature, I messed up, I righted myself bit by bit, and fell in love with books, starting with the very first book in my collection: Anna Karenina.
I found my clothbound, light-pink 1969 edition of Anna Karenina in two volumes on an old blanket at an outdoor market in Chisinau, Moldova. Before that, I had only borrowed books from the library, but I knew I would never finish all 800 pages of Anna Karenina before the library due date. I didn’t feel ready to read it yet, and was worried as I asked its price the seller would hear my accent and recognize me for a fraud. I bought it anyway. It sat on my shelf for a while, and once I took the plunge and started reading, just five or six pages at a time, it lay in my school bag for months. However, I didn’t want to give up the excitement of discovering Russian literature in the meantime, so I spent my free time browsing coffee-shop book exchanges and flea markets in search of the rest of the Russian cannon. I was very stubborn: I refused to buy any modern editions, only Soviet-era ones. This was partly due to the pleasure of the search itself and the high quality of Soviet books, but I also loved the idea that these used books transcended time. If they had been read in the past, they could wait a little longer for me to read them in the future. In the face of the daily insecurity I faced speaking Russian, the books I collected were an investment in someday, an affirmation of my ongoing linguistic progress. Thanks to reading, my language skills did progress. Last spring, I was not only reading 200 pages a week of challenging modernist literature, but also discussing and writing essays about it in Russian.
As my language skills have improved, my love of Soviet books has evolved into a love for collecting them throughout the former Soviet Union. Yes, the books in my collection are ubiquitous in the region, but also, that is one of the reasons they matter so much to me. Although I couldn’t quite articulate this when I started my collection in Moldova, I love that these books transcend both time and space. As I continue to explore new countries, finding the same books on the shelves – with publication imprints from Vilnius to Ashkhabad – is both comforting and inspiring. Many of my boldest travel decisions have been driven by books. Not once, but twice, I’ve trekked to the mountains of the Caucasus – first from the Georgia side, then from the Russia side – in search of the spirit of Mikhail Lermontov. This past spring, I spontaneously joined a tour wandering the lilac-perfumed streets of Moscow from midnight to dawn in search of the dark, delirious magic of Master and Margarita.
My Russian literature collection started in Moldova, and its future is also beyond Russia. In addition to Russian, I now speak passable Turkish and Ukrainian, and am learning Uzbek and Kyrgyz. I would be thrilled to add classics in these languages to my collection, an investment in a future when I will be able to read them. The carefully censored way that the Soviet Union approached its national and linguistic diversity is interesting in and of itself, and this may be revealed in its national-language publications. At the same time, my Russian literature collection has room to grow, especially women writers and editions from the pre-War Soviet period.
“Manuscripts don’t burn” is the most famous quote in Master and Margarita, but I have a different favorite: “Be careful with your wishes; they have a habit of coming true.” I collected Russian literature because I wished to be good at Russian, and the books made my wish come true. I continue collecting Soviet-era books because I wish to travel to and engage with as much of the former Soviet Union as possible. Perhaps my book collecting passion itself, through the Brooker Prize, will help that wish come true as well.