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[Fwd: Just as Nabokov never got over the agony of exile ...]
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Subject: Just as Nabokov never got over the agony of exile ...
Date: Sun, 02 Jun 2002 02:47:01 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
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To: chtodel@gte.net
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/magazine/02SHTEYN.html
From Russia With Tsoris
By DANIEL ZALEWSKI
raining his third glass of horseradish vodka, Gary Shteyngart is
starting to feel chummy. Sliding over on the curved banquette, the
young novelist asks to show me some photographs -- snapshots, he says,
of a recent trip he took in the ''disaster that is my homeland, the
former Soviet Union.''
Shteyngart hands over the first picture: a poorly composed shot of a
nondescript urban plaza. ''Oh, this is a great one!'' he says. ''This is
Tbilisi, Georgia. One night, I was chased down this street right here by
a man with a knife!'' He smiles wistfully. ''The guy had just lost it
somehow; he was crazy with despair. You see it all the time there. I
went back the next day to memorialize the event.'' He flips to a photo
of several hirsute men sitting around a banquet table. Shteyngart, who
is in this picture, fits right in: his jet-black goatee is so dense and
bristly that you could shine your shoes with it. ''I spent a long
weekend outside Tbilisi,'' he explains, ''with some guys who were trying
to . . . recruit me.'' In the snapshot, a grinning Shteyngart is holding
up an enormous ram's horn. ''It was a ceremonial toast,'' he says.
''They were excited, I think, because they thought they'd succeeded in
getting a clever Jew from New York to help them with a scheme.'' The
plot, he adds cryptically, ''had to do with American charities.'' (He
declined to participate.) So are these acquaintances mafiya? ''Let me
put it this way,'' he says wryly. ''This 24-year-old here is practically
the only guy in the country with a Porsche.''
Shteyngart is sitting with me in the back booth at the Russian Samovar,
a Midtown Manhattan restaurant that serves blini and caviar to nostalgic
immigrants. Tonight he is just another anonymous regular. But soon this
community will discover that this small, scurrilous-looking 29-year-old
has been spying on them -- and their relatives back home -- with a
merciless, mischievous eye.
Shteyngart's first novel, ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook,'' is a
rambunctious satire that upends one of the most solemn traditions in
American literature: the immigrant novel. The hopeful toilers of ''My
Antonia'' and ''Call It Sleep'' have been replaced by Vladimir Girshkin,
an embittered ''beta immigrant'' who lacks the drive to assimilate into
1990's New York. (His upwardly striving ''alpha immigrant'' parents, who
have vaulted to suburban success, can't fathom his failure.) Sick of
being ''a man who couldn't measure up to the natives,'' Girshkin turns
on America like a spurned lover. He hops on a plane to Eastern Europe --
where, under the auspices of Russian gangsters, he sets up a Ponzi
scheme whose victims are rich ''idiot Americans'' looking for a quick
post-Communist buck.
In his novel, Shteyngart revels in detailing the debased behavior of his
fictional co-nationals. The cast of seedy ex-Soviets includes everyone
from Kalashnikov-toting casino managers to Pushkin-quoting prostitutes.
And as his strange photo display is making clear, it is a world he knows
with surprising intimacy (and one he revisits frequently for fresh
material).
He picks up a snapshot of a beach -- ordinary looking except for the oil
rig in the distance. ''This is Baku,'' he says. ''Last year on the
promenade here, I was sitting on a bench, taking a break from finishing
my novel. A woman approached, offering herself for $5. When I said no,
she offered to include her 5-year-old daughter.''
Such encounters ''can be hugely depressing,'' he admits. Yet he adds
that it is his duty to capture the aching desperation of modern Russian
life, whether in Brighton Beach or in Moscow. ''The past 100 years have
been just horrific for Russians,'' he says. ''They're history's losers.
Their country has become a third-world cesspool. Yet the Russian people
have to survive somehow. I'm not excusing criminality, especially not
violence, but I do try to understand it.''
Shteyngart turns to a photo of the apartment in St. Petersburg (then
Leningrad) where his family lived until 1978, when Gary was 6. (His
parents were not religious, but they seized the opportunity anyway when
Brezhnev began allowing Jews to emigrate.) A large statue of Lenin
towers out front. His former home, he reveals with disgust, has become
an ''all-Mafiya building, with one Mercedes after another out front.''
Finally, he flips to a picture of a tragic-looking St. Petersburg bar.
Two gentle-faced friends, looking plastered, stare woozily into the
lens. ''These guys, they're brilliant, they're wonderful people, but
they're stuck,'' he says, his lightly accented voice charged with
emotion. ''Everyone in Russia is depressed, but instead of the DSM-IV,
they have vodka. If Vladimir Girshkin is a beta immigrant, these guys
are deltas. They'll never get out.'' He is silent for a moment. ''If not
for my parents, this would've been me.''
ary Shteyngart may be the only Soviet emigre in history who had no
desire to leave. ''It sounds weird, but I loved my Soviet
childhood,'' he says. ''The Communist life suited me just great. I loved
the Red Army and everything. It only became horrible once you were an
adult.'' A frail child with a Proustian case of asthma, Shteyngart spent
much of his youth idling inside his family's Stalin-era apartment,
dictating stories to his adoring grandmother. ''I used to play with
clothespins, imagining they were Soviet planes,'' he recalls. ''I was so
happy.'' Indeed, in Shteyngart's novel, Girshkin's recollections of his
own family's Leningrad apartment are the book's most tender, evoking
Nabokov's lyrical account of hiding behind the family sofa in ''Speak,
Memory.''
Just as Nabokov never got over the agony of exile, Shteyngart has never
been able to embrace fully his identity as an American. He describes
himself as a ''global writer'' who is, first and foremost, a Russian.
His resistance to the U.S.A. started early. Whereas his go-get-'em
parents were thrilled to start a new life in Queens -- after a few
menial jobs, his father, Semyon, became a mechanical engineer; his
mother, Nina, a fiscal manager -- Gary was miserable.
Shteyngart shudders when recalling the local Hebrew school he attended.
''Oh, it was a barbarous place,'' he intones operatically. ''Everyone
was so mean. It was my Year Zero.'' Not only did he not speak English,
but his classmates also ridiculed him. ''The big problem was that I only
had three shirts,'' he says, ''and unfortunately, they looked exactly
alike. In the Soviet Union, you could get away with that, but not
here.'' Gary's Siberia-worthy overcoat, a woolen monstrosity, was so
derided that his teacher called his mother, insisting she throw it out.
Although he remained ''virtually friendless,'' Shteyngart played the
role of upstart immigrant well enough. His high test scores got him
accepted at Stuyvesant, one of the city's top public high schools. He
announced to his parents his plans to become a ruthless
multimillionaire. ''The only TV show my family and I watched was
'Dallas,''' he says. ''I'd tell them I wanted to be like J.R.''
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