50
PARTISAN R EVIEW
end, slamming the door of the last line and waiting for applause to
fill
the hush. And there was the old
cher maitre
dropping, pearl by
pearl, an admirable tale he had read innumerable times, and always
in the same manner, wearing the expression of fastidious distaste that
his nobly furrowed face had in the frontispiece of his collected works.
I suppose it would be easy for a detached observer to poke fun
at all these hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities
a dead civilization, the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian
mirages of St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1916 (which, even
then, in the twenties and thirties, sounded like 1900-1916 B.C.). But
at least they were rebels as most major Russian writers had been
ever since Russian literature had existed, and true to this insurgent
condition which their sense of justice and liberty craved for as strongly
as it had done under the oppression of the Czars,
emigres
regarded
as monstrously un-Russian and subhuman the behavior of pampered
authors in the Soviet Union, the servile response on the part of those
authors to every shade of every governmental decree; for the art
of prostration was growing there in exact ratio to the increasing
efficiency of first Lenin's, then Stalin's political police, and the suc–
cessful Soviet writer was the one whose fine ear caught the soft
whisper of an official suggestion long before it had become a blare.
Owing to the limited circulation of their works abroad, even
the older generation of
emigre
writers whose fame had been solidly
established in pre-Revolution Russia, could not hope that their books
would make a living for them. Writing a weekly column for an
emigre
paper was never quite sufficient to keep body and pen to–
gether. Now and then translations into other languages brought in an
unexpected scoop; but, otherwise, grants from various
emigre
or–
ganizations, earnings from public readings and lavish private charity
were responsible for prolonging elderly authors' lives. Younger, less
known but more adaptable writers supplemented chance subsidies
by engaging in various jobs. I remember teaching English and tennis.
Patiently I thwarted the persistent knack Berlin businessmen had of
pronouncing "business" so as to rhyme with "dizziness"; and like a
slick automaton, under the slow-moving clouds of a long summer day,
on dusty courts, I ladled ball after ball over the net to their tanned,
bob-haired daughters. For five dollars (quite a sum during the in–
flation in Germany) I translated
Alice in Wonderland
into Russian.
I helped compile a Russian grammar for foreigners in which the first
